BattlelandTroops
The historically-porous frontier dividing Afghanistan from Pakistan — all 1,600 miles (2,400 km.) of it — has long been easily crossed by Taliban fighters seeking to attack U.S. troops in Afghanistan, who then withdraw back into the relative safety of Pakistan. If that constant border crossing isn’t headache enough for local …
BattlelandPresident Obama
Aryn Baker spells it out over on Global Spin:
If President Obama’s plan for withdrawal demonstrated the unusual feat of simultaneously pissing off both sides of the aisle in the US, he need not despair: in Afghanistan he most certainly drew applause from both the Taliban, and Karzai – who crowed in an interview with CNN on Sunday that
…
BattlelandPentagon
That’s the word from Capitol Hill as detailed in this morning’s lead story in the Washington Post:
Freshman Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) could serve as a poster boy for the new breed of conservatives who are eager to wipe out government waste and inefficiency, no matter where they find it. Kinzinger, an active-duty Air National
…
BattlelandWeapons
David Willman’s new book, The Mirage Man, dives deeply into the anthrax mailings that took place shortly after 9/11 and further panicked an already-distraught American public. He hones in on Dr. Bruce Ivins as the perpetrator, and details a strong case implicating the Army bio-weapons expert, who committed suicide three years ago as …
BattlelandWeapons
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BcerPCn3MlA]
We’ve all seen the airplane-sized Predator and Reaper drones now flying and fighting over Afghanistan, Libya, Pakistan and Yemen. They’re fairly big (the Predator has a 48-foot [15-m.] wingspan) and costly ($5 million each). But there are fleets of smaller and cheaper man-launched …
BattlelandVeterans
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UmbpFmHAvw&feature=channel_video_title]
Thousands of soldiers, gravely wounded in Afghanistan and Iraq, become as much as they can be through months of rehabilitation in the Army’s Warrior Transition Units. Every once in awhile a story pops up about how things fells apart for a specific WTU …
BattlelandVeterans
We reported on the growing use of prescription drugs by troops in Afghanistan and Iraq more than three years ago. The Pentagon is finally catching up. It wants to spend $23 million next year for drug testing to make sure troops aren’t illicitly taking legal drugs like Valium and Vicodin.
But the House Appropriations Committee has …
BattlelandTroops
A senior White House official was eager Thursday night to hear from a reporter on just how President Obama’s decision to pull 10,000 troops out of Afghanistan by year’s end was playing. “How do you think he did?” he asked at the fringe of Pakistani ambassador Husain Haqanni’s annual barbeque. “Well, Mullen and Petraeus were pretty …
BattlelandPresident Obama
The always impertinent Tony Karon, over on our Global Spin blog, has some questions he wants President Obama to answer:
1. What will Obama tell the loved ones of Americans killed in Afghanistan in the next three years?
2. How does the U.S. persuade Afghan civilians or neighboring countries to do its bidding when it acknowledges its …
BattlelandPresident Obama
That’s the title of a sour but thoughtful piece now up on Small Wars Journal:
As in Vietnam, the war in Afghanistan was lost before it was begun: it is lost because it cannot be won. Again our massive and superior military force is losing a campaign to a tough insurgent force. Again we are spending tens of billions overseas, and
…
BattlelandTroops
As Washington debates the fate of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, the 30,000 troops and others assigned to its main base — Bagram — north of Kabul are tending to more mundane matters. They’re leading the same sort of dreary lives, punctuated by horror and farce, that have defined soldiers’ lives in these parts since Alexander the Great …
BattlelandPresident Obama
The President’s decisions are more aggressive and incur more risk than I was originally prepared to accept.
— Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, in his prepared statement to the House Armed Services Committee Thursday morning, on the Afghan troop withdrawal announced by President Obama Wednesday evening
BattlelandWeapons
Folks don’t think a lot about the advances the U.S. military brings to everyday life. For starters, there’s the Internet, via which you’re now reading Battleland (yes, it was the brainchild of the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, not Al Gore). DARPA also played a major role in creating something else we take for …
