BattlelandMilitary Mental Health
TIME’s photo blog, LightBox, has published a stunning series of photographs of tattoos troops get to commemorate their experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan. That kind of body art is a little-noticed trend among the small percentage of Americans serving in the military.
In fact, TIME did it to help shine some light on the growing …
BattlelandLibya
Al Jazeera has posted new footage of the Libyan dictator who appears to be alive and in rebel hands. Later footage shows him dead on the street. This raises obvious questions about how, exactly, he died.
Warning: the video is graphic and disturbing.
BattlelandTerrorism
How stupid are the Iranians? If the allegations by the United States are true, they hired a used car salesman in Texas to knock of the Saudi ambassador to the United States, and they also introduced the used car salesman to members of the Quds force like it was a cocktail party.
The main character in this drama is Manssor Arbabsiar, a …
BattlelandNational Security
Nearly three-quarters of a million veterans back from Iraq and Afghanistan who are now out of the military have sought medical care from the government, and more than half of those service members suffer from a mental health condition, including post-traumatic stress disorder.
These are among the stunning numbers in a new report …
BattlelandNational Security
Bad news. Hovering over Sudan, George Clooney’s spy satellites have detected a massive column of roughly 3,000 troops, tanks, artillery, and helicopters moving from northern Sudan traveling south toward the rebel stronghold of Kurmuk in the Blue Nile border area.
This is very, very bad. It suggests the strong possibility that …
BattlelandMilitary Mental Health
First Lady Michelle Obama bounded energetically onto a stage set up last April at a Sears distribution facility in Columbus, Ohio. Shiny black and red lawn tractors stood stacked in storage crates up to the warehouse ceiling behind her, a backdrop intimating hearty manufacturing jobs and bucolic suburban lawns.
Two days earlier, …
BattlelandCounter-Insurgency
Counter-insurgency is so 2007. Everybody knows that Republicans and Democrats have quietly agreed that flooding some dusty foreign land with U.S. troops is too expensive, and we can’t stomach the casualties any longer.
All the cool kids are into counter-terrorism now. (Note to think tanks: It’s no longer hip to tell reporters …
BattlelandBattleland
The Taliban on Sunday drove a massive truck bomb into a U.S. combat outpost in the central-east province of Wardak, killing two Afghans and wounding 77 U.S. service members. CNN reported that, “Investigators are looking at the possibility that insurgents originally planned to use the bomb against a high-profile target in Kabul around the …
BattlelandPolitics
The GOP has been demonstrably hawkish for decades. Part of this is philosophical, but acting tough has also been reliable currency in the Republican Party for years.
It’s interesting what 10 years of war will do.
Politicians know which way the wind blows, and America is war-weary — ten-years-of-war weary. They are sick of the …
BattlelandPentagon
Some government anti-terrorism officials worry that the shiny new Defense Department office complex just south of the Pentagon, the Mark Center, is a death trap. The massive, two-tower center is the new home for 6,400 employees of the Washington Headquarters Service, located about 3 miles south of the Pentagon. It’s part of BRAC and …
BattlelandTerrorism
The 9-11 Commission got the band back together Wednesday nearly ten years after the attacks to assess progress on implementing their 2004 recommendations intended to make us all safe from al-Qaeda and like-minded creeps. The assessment: We are safe-er. “We are not as secure yet as we can or we should be,” Chairman Thomas Kean, the former …
BattlelandLibya
The game-changer in terms of effective NATO air support for the Libyan rebels was time. That’s because it took months for NATO to re-create a coalition-style precision air strike campaign similar to what the United States leads daily in places like Afghanistan.
Battleland has talked about the air war above Libya with U.S. …
BattlelandBattleland
There is some good new in the world. This ain’t the biggest deal, but we’ll take it.
The Army will reduce the length of many combat deployments from 12 months to 9 months. This is also down from the height of the Iraq war, when many soldiers spent 15 months at war. The shortened tours don’t begin until early 2012 and don’t apply …
