BattlelandWeapons
Articles from Contributor
BattlelandWeapons
BattlelandPentagon
Figures Don’t Lie
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House Republicans fear the prospect of incoming defense cuts, and they’ve just produced a video to argue against them. Fair enough. “What is our military going to do if we keep cutting them?” asks Rep. Howard McKeon, chairman of the armed services committee. Of course, while …
BattlelandPentagon
When the Pentagon Was New
World War II means two things to U.S. military veterans of a certain age: the building of the Pentagon, and LIFE magazine (TIME’s corporate sibling). Every week LIFE chronicled the war for millions of Americans.
LIFE.com has just released never-before published photographs of the Department of Defense headquarters building under …
BattlelandVeterans
Writing the Book on Military Mental Health
The literature of war can be literature — think Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage (Civil War), Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (World War I), or Neil Sheehan’s A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam. And sometimes it’s less lit and more textbook. That’s surely the case with the …
BattlelandTerrorism
“Did the U.S. Overreact to 9/11?”
It’s a fair question as the 10th anniversary of the horrific attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon looms. After all, it was the most shocking macro-event most Americans alive have experienced. It changed our way of life, or at least our way of living. It also triggered two costly and continuing wars. If we did overreact, …
BattlelandVeterans
Mercenary Army (cont.)
So plans are floating around the Pentagon — with the apparent blessing of Defense Secretary Leon Panetta — that call for a U.S. military force of only between 3,000 and 4,000 troops in Iraq starting next year. Under the existing deal with the Iraqi government — the one we helped install — all U.S. troops must be out by New Year’s …
BattlelandWeapons
Buttering Our Guns
In these tough economic times, just how much of a fiscal punch does defense spending provide? A couple of experts weigh in with contrasting takes on an issue that will grow in importance as the nation weighs cuts in military spending.
BattlelandTerrorism
Defanging Those “Lone Wolves”
In this week of massive 9/11 coverage, it’s important to keep terror threats in perspective. The recent hot threat seems to be “lone wolves” who become jihadists over the Internet while living somewhere in America. To be sure, there are such animals; Exhibit A is Army Major Nidal Hassan, who killed 13 at Fort Hood in 2009. …
BattlelandWeapons
Kind of Makes You Wonder What It Takes to Win the Highest Award
The Air Force brass has nominated Staff Sergeant Robert Gutierrez for the Air Force Cross, its second-highest award for bravery. He was the lone Air Force targeteer assigned to an Army special-forces team in Afghanistan nearly two years ago. The unit’s night-time missi0n: capture a top Taliban leader in the western part of the …
BattlelandTroops
Taking Stock: The U.S. Military a Decade After 9/11
The 10th anniversary of 9/11 closes in on us this week. Try as you might, you will not be able to avoid it. Amid the pathos and bathos, it’s time to take a knee and conduct a map check.
Just to cut to the chase: you can’t argue with success, and on 9/12 most Americans were petrified a second wave of attacks was likely. It hasn’t …
BattlelandTroops
Body Count 2.0
One of the most depressing things about the Vietnam conflict was the steady stream of announcements that so many more Viet Cong and North Vietnamese had died during the prior week than U.S. troops. We felt good about that until some 58,000 Americans had been killed.
By then, we were beginning to suspect that someone on the U.S. …
BattlelandTroops
Suicidal Bird of Prey
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Make no mistake about it: weapons are becoming increasingly small, unmanned and autonomous. For the latest, check out this video of Textron’s candidate to become the Air Force’s Lethal Miniature Aerial Munition System (LMAMS). Grab some popcorn, crank up …
BattlelandVeterans
Unending War
Greg Jaffe had a spot-on piece in the Washington Post‘s Labor Day edition discussing the U.S. government’s notion that permanent war is now the American way of life. He captures the all-but-paranoid notion that foreign enemies are forever plotting ways to end the American way of life, as we know it.
But while that is the view of …