The chart below shows how traumatic brain injuries — which usually happen when troops’ brains are violently shaken inside their skulls due to roadside bombs — have soared among U.S. troops in Afghanistan and Iraq. They’ve jumped from less than 80 a month in 2003 to more than 450 a month this year. That’s more than 15 U.S. troops a day …
It’s easy to poke fun at military bands. Like shooting fish in a bugle. Given the Pentagon’s tightening budgets, they make for a tempting target. But then you come across a newspaper story like this, detailing a short concert by a five-piece U.S. Navy brass band at a Freetown, Sierra Leone, school earlier this week.
The Principal of the
…
And you thought the real war was between the U.S. military and the Taliban. Or the U.S. military and Saddam’s army inside Iraq? Actually, the most brutal conflict was between Army Gen. Hugh Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and his boss — Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. That’s the bottom line in Shelton’s fat, …
Thomas P.M. Barnett is an old Pentagon hand and heavy-duty national-security thinker. He’s perplexed by a glaring omission in Tuesday’s front-page New York Times‘ piece on the growing distrust expressed by young Chinese military officers towards the U.S.
“This is the same U.S. military that assembles multinational war games in China’s …
The federal judge who ruled the Pentagon’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy unconstitutional last month ordered the U.S. military to stop kicking openly gay men and women out of uniform Tuesday.
Defendants United States of America and the Secretary of Defense immediately to suspend and discontinue any investigation, or discharge,
…
Good piece in the Washington Post this morning. The story is buried in the Metro section when it really should be on Page One. It has to do with the engravings on troops’ grave markers at Arlington National Cemetery, the nation’s troubled final resting place for its honored dead. It tell us something about the Army we’d rather not …
Kenneth Eugene Clodfelter, Richard Costelow, Lakeina Monique Francis, Timothy Lee Gauna, Cheron Luis Gunn, James Rodrick McDaniels, Mark Ian Nieto, Ronald Scott Owens, Lakiba Nicole Palmer, Joshua Langdon Parlett, Patrick Howard Roy, Kevin Shawn Rux, Ronchester Mananga Santiago, Timothy Lamont Saunders, Gary Graham Swenchonis Jr. Andrew …
It’s fitting that as Army Maj. Nidal Hasan faces his first major pre-trial hearing today, the Pentagon is seeking a way to prevent future soldiers from killing their own.
“Each time we see an incident like a soldier in good mental health becoming homicidal or suicidal, or an innocent insider becoming malicious, we wonder why we …
The man behind the fusillade of bullets that felled 13 people at Fort Hood last November enters the public spotlight for the first time starting Wednesday. That’s a 24-hour delay, granted by the military judge to give Maj. Nidal Hasan’s defense team until then to detail their request for postponing the legal proceeding until Nov. 8. …
There’s been a ban on U.S. arms sales to China since three days after 1989’s Tiananmen Square clash, when tanks and soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army attacked and killed an unknown number of Chinese students. At least until last Friday, that is.
President Obama sent a terse letter to Congress saying it was time for an …
Linda Norgrove’s death — apparently at the hands of her would-be U.S. military rescuers in Afghanistan last Friday — reminds us that snafu — “situation normal, all fouled up” — is a U.S. military term:
If something can go wrong in war, it will.
That’s the bottom line from 10 Downing Street today, where Britain’s prime minister said Scottish aid worker Linda Norgrove may have been killed by her American rescuers last Friday in Afghanistan, rather than by her Taliban captors.
David Cameron said that General David Petraeus has …
You know how when your jalopy out in the driveway starts getting old and the transmission goes? Before deciding to spend a coupla grand to fix it, you and your significant other sit around the kitchen table and ask: hey, is it really worth pouring all that money into the old heap?
The U.S. Air Force just sat around its kitchen table …