House Armed Services Readiness Subcommittee Chairman J. Randy Forbes (R-VA) held a hearing on the state of the military this week. The conclusion is stark: the U.S. military is at a breaking point. Today. Right now.
None of America’s armed forces can meet all of the global demands placed on them by commanders today. Were an …
It’s creepy pontificating about somebody’s possible assassination, but you’ve got to wonder how Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai sleeps at night. Sadly, you also have to wonder what kind of chaos might follow if he got killed.
The mayor of Kandahar is dead. News reports say he died after a suicide bomber hid an explosive in his …
I wanted to comment briefly on Mark Benjamin’s piece about casualty announcements being a painful as ever. Mark noted that three soldiers killed on July 18th in Afghanistan were all from a Pennsylvania National Guard unit, and that one of them, Sgt Brian K. Mowery, at age 49 could easily have been a grandfather. Lots of Guard and …
Last week I wrote a post about an inspector general report that suggested Afghan VIPs were flying out of Kabul with U.S. aid money stuffed in their suitcases at the rate of about $10 million bucks a day. What was perhaps more disturbing about that July 27 report from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction was the …
Remember how you doled out allowances to your kids, trying to teach them the value of a quarter before moving on to a dollar? (OK — I was cheap.) Check out this chart from a Thursday report from the Government Accountability Office: direct payments to Afghanistan from Washington more than tripled between 2009 and 2010 with …
Afghan government VIPs stuff your tax dollars into suitcases and fly the money out of the Kabul airport to parts unknown, possibly at the rate of about $10 million bucks a day. That’s one of the startling conclusions in the latest report from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction released on Wednesday.
It says …
Marine Lieut. General John Allen told the Senate Armed Services Committee three weeks ago that he was “cautiously optimistic” about the future of Afghanistan as he readied to take over for Army General Dave Petraeus (the change of command happened Monday).
A new State Department inspector general’s report — Sensitive But …
Some of the Defense Department’s short casualty announcements cause me to stop and think more than others, though they are all equally tragic, of course. I try to read them all, and they don’t seem to be getting less painful with time.
But even in those brief announcements — the age, rank, unit, and a general description of the cause …
Our friends over at Danger Room have posted an item about the U.S. Special Operations Command’s search for someone to turn U.S. troops into Afghan cooks. But not just any kind of Afghan cooks. As the contract solicitation explains:
This training shall encompass instruction on; Slaughter techniques, cultural diversity, equipment
…
Pakistan, you may have heard, is finding it challenging to battle the friendly (to them) Taliban forces on its soil that only cross into Afghanistan to kill U.S. troops (the Pakistanis have no compunction about killing the other Taliban — those trying to topple the government in Islamabad). So it was interesting to see the …
If you’ve been paying attention, you may have heard that President Obama has pledged to cut $400 billion out of security spending between now and 2023. But what you may not know is that the $400 billion won’t be a cut as far as Joe and Jane Taxpayer are concerned. Todd Harrison, Washington’s defense-budget wizard, says letting Pentagon …
So wondering if you have what it takes to pilot one of those MQ-1 Predator or MQ-9 Reaper unmanned drones for the U.S. Air Force? Huh? Well, drones have pilots, just like more traditional aircraft. The only difference is the drone operator’s controls tend to be in some trailer – safely on the ground – far away from the drone …
There is really nothing new in the war game, as Haunting Legacy: Vietnam and the American Presidency from Ford to Obama by the father-daughter team of Marvin and Deborah Kalb makes clear. It could hardly be more timely, as America and its leaders grapple with the challenges posed by Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya – all at once. The …
