BattlelandWeapons
The real surge in Afghanistan isn’t the 30,000 additional troops President Obama sent there last year, but the 400% hike in close-air support missions from 2004 to 2010. Over that same time span, the number of weapons deployed on those missions ballooned from 86 to 5,101 — a 5,800% increase. You can track the trend in the chart …
BattlelandPolitics
Chas Freeman was President Nixon’s interpreter during Nixon’s historic visit to China in 1972. Now, nearly 40 years later, after an impressive diplomatic and defense career, he’s interpreting China for the rest of us.
Last week he said:
The balance of prestige, if not yet the balance of power, between the United States and China
…
BattlelandPolitics
The Vulcans were the foreign-policy realists of the George W. Bush Administration. Their presence on his campaign team before his 2000 election as President blunted suggestions that the Texas governor lacked sufficient overseas chops. But now one of those Vulcans has come forward to shed some light on the goings-on inside their …
BattlelandTerrorism
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OK — admit it. It’s been awhile since the nation had such a sense of accomplishment. But the Navy SEALs — admired not only for their bravery, but for their willingness to do so invisibly — have touched a lot of folks around the country. What lawmaker …
BattlelandPolitics
John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat, has long had a hankering to serve as the nation’s top diplomat. Over the past weekend, he was on a whirlwind tour of the AfPak theater, where his words garnered headlines usually accorded the secretary of state:
Afghanistan May Be Open To New Path, Kerry Says, according to Sunday’s New York …
BattlelandWeapons
Time colleagues Kayla Webley and Gilbert Cruz spell out the 10 reasons why Top Gun is still awesome.
BattlelandTroops
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BattlelandSpecial Operations
If our dealings with Pakistan are hampered by the same flawed assumptions we used in our hunt for Osama bin Laden, the road ahead for Washington and Islamabad is likely to be rocky. Over at Small Wars Journal, Will Chalmers, a research assistant at the Centre for Security, Armed Forces and Society at the Royal Military College of …
BattlelandPentagon
So last week, NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen was telling us that everything was going swimmingly in his alliance’s effort to force Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi from power. “We have succeeding in taking out a lot of his capacities, and now you see the opposition is gaining ground,” Rasmussen said Thursday. “We are …
BattlelandPolitics
During U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ visit to China in January, Beijing heralded his arrival with the first public flight of its J-20 stealth fighter. Tonight, in honor of the arrival of General Chen Bingde, chief of staff of China’s People’s Liberation Army, the U.S. will return the favor: with a joint concert featuring the …
BattlelandNational Security
Interesting story in Sunday’s New York Times on the Blackwater folks setting up a mercenary force in the United Arab Emirates. No wonder we are despised around the world. Here’s the guts of the matter:
The force is intended to conduct special operations missions inside and outside the country, defend oil pipelines and skyscrapers
…
BattlelandNational Security
Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.
— Harry S Truman, August 8, 1950
BattlelandWeapons
I’ve been reading the publicly-released Pentagon Selected Acquisition Reports for decades. They’re the one place you can get a bottom-line price on various U.S. military weapons systems. But they’re generally two-page summaries, not the detailed reports that generate those summaries.
So hats off to Steven Aftergood’s Secrecy …
