Mark Thompson

Pulitzer Prize-winner Mark Thompson has covered national security in Washington since 1979, and for Time since 1994. Follow him on Twitter at @MarkThompson_DC

Articles from Contributor

Battleland Battleland

Military Headache

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 …

Battleland Battleland

Play It Again, (Uncle) Sam

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

Battleland Battleland

Top General: Rumsfeld Was Worst Leader Ever

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, …

Battleland Battleland

Turning Chinese Tables

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 Timespiece 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 …

Battleland Battleland

Remember The Cole…

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 …

Battleland Battleland

Better Late Than Never Dept.

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 …

Battleland Battleland

China Syndrome

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 …

Battleland Battleland

Afghan Friendly Fire?

 

 

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 …

Battleland Battleland

Where's Aamco When You Need It?

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 …

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