BattlelandAfghanistan
Helicopters are wonderful machines that, like a bumblebee, are supposed to be unable to fly. It’s all that whirling hardware linked by shafts, masts, transmissions, cyclics and collectives that give them their amazing …
BattlelandMilitary Mental Health
A record number of soldiers – 38 – are suspected of killing themselves in July, the Pentagon said Thursday. It marks a startling jump in the suicide epidemic that has been frustrating Army leaders for years.
BattlelandSuicide
The Army’s failure to cut down on its suicide rate makes it a target for people without taste. Alas, the July figures due out shortly are unlikely to help.
As someone who has covered military suicides, and the folks waging the …
BattlelandWar Story
Times have gotten tougher in Afghanistan given the latest green-on-blue attacks, where Afghan troops – or at least killers clad like Afghan troops – have taken to killing U.S. and other allied personnel with firearms or suicide vests. Army Major David Fitzpatrick, who was deployed as a trainer for the Afghan military in Kabul from …
BattlelandMilitary Justice
BattlelandAir Force
The Air Force spent a lot of time and money a generation ago when it designed its C-17 cargo airplane to take off and land at short, unimproved runways around the world – “austere” was the word of choice. But it couldn’t imagine that capability would be needed because a pilot would someday err and land at the tiny Davis Islands …
BattlelandNavy
Ever wonder how one of the Navy’s most sophisticated warships, the guided missile destroyer USS Porter, could collide with an oil tanker just outside the Strait of Hormuz early Sunday? Well, safe to say the Navy is trying to …
BattlelandMilitary
BattlelandState Department
The latest issue of the Air Force’s Air & Space Power Journal complains that the service’s promotion system leaves a lot to be desired, and quotes from its own officer’s training guide to prove it:
“Throughout the
…
BattlelandNavy
Ernest Borgnine, God bless him, may have passed on, but real Navy skippers can fill the void left by Lieut. Commander Quinton McHale’s passing. Check out the latest from the New London Day:
Navy Cmdr. Michael P. Ward II, who
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BattlelandVeterans
Nearly a century after her late husband served in the World War I U.S. cavalry, Alda Collins is finally getting the VA benefits his service entitled her to receive. Her son, 73, tells the local Daily American: “I’ve been trying …
BattlelandAuthor Q&A
Mike Lofgren came to Washington to work on Capitol Hill 30 years ago, when Ronald Reagan was rebuilding America’s “hollow military” after its Vietnam hangover, and the Cold War was in its final throes – although we didn’t know it yet. He spent 28 years working for Congress, the last 16 as a senior analyst on the House and …
BattlelandMilitary Women
Things certainly have changed since Janet Wolfenbarger walked up the long ramp at the Air Force Academy in 1976, under a sign declaring in two-foot high brushed aluminum letters: BRING …
