…this week in Time magazine, Battleland’s own Nate Rawlings joins forces with Time AfPak correspondent Aryn Baker to write the compelling story on Bowe Bergdahl, the U.S. Army sergeant who has been held by insurgents along the AfPak frontier for nearly three years. In this video, Nate talks about the Bergdahl case, and why he found it …
Afghanistan
The Defense Build-Down is On, But Fantasies Remain
Marine General John Allen, commander of forces in Afghanistan, is planning for the end – the withdrawal of U.S. forces, expecting to leave behind a small training force, but saddling the U.S. taxpayers with at least $2 billion a year to pay for the Afghan security force. Better deal than we have now, at roughly $100 billion a year, …
Waiting for Bowe: America’s Last Captured Soldier
Nearly three years ago, Private First Class Bowe Bergdahl, a machine gunner with the 4th Brigade (Airborne), 25th Infantry Division, disappeared from his outpost in eastern Afghanistan. A short time later, the military learned …
Another Face of Multiple Deployments
It’s been nearly two months since the Kandahar massacre – some time and distance, but not much. Some things are clearer, some things still aren’t. We don’t know why Staff Sergeant Robert Bales did what he did. We do know the American public’s confidence in the war effort plunged post-Kandahar. We don’t know if that …
“A Moral Outrage”
The over-deployment of a too-small military since 9/11 has led to a peculiar situation where Congress and the nation feel a subtle sense of guilt over what they have put the nation’s young men and women in uniform through. It has warped military compensation and retirement policies, Lawrence J. Korb, Alex Rothman, and Max Hoffman write …
Letters from Abbottabad: Bin Laden’s Bleak Final Days
The latest batch of Osama bin Laden documents shows what you’d expect from a one-time terror mastermind whose best years were behind him. He’d spent six years confined to a house with several of his wives, and where the only way he could get outside was to walk inside the walled compound, or atop the walled rooftop.
Nearly 200 …
A Sad Anniversary Celebration
It’s sad that what should be a day of quiet satisfaction – the anniversary of the death of Osama bin Laden, the killer of nearly 3,000 innocents – has degenerated into a political spitball fight.
Battleland well …
How U.S. Commanders Deal With Their Military Allies
We’re all familiar with Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and her five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and, finally, acceptance.
Well, over at Best Defense, Tom Ricks has come up with a similar construct detailing the six stages U.S. military commanders go through in their dealings with their local counterparts in …
Los Angeles Times’ Atrocity Photos: Truth Teller, or Newspaper Seller?
I just read about another reprehensible incident that has come to light after two years. Photos of soldiers from the 82nd Airborne, based at Fort Bragg, N.C., posing with body parts of dead suicide bombers in Afghanistan, were recently published by the Los Angeles Times. The troops were stationed in Afghanistan in 2010.
Americans …
Staff Sergeant Bales – Or His Lawyer — Refuses a Sanity Board
John Browne said Friday that he has refused to let his client participate in what’s known in the Army as a 706 Board or “sanity board.” His client is Army Staff Sergeant Robert Bales, who stands charged by the U.S. Army with murdering 17 Afghan civilians outside Kandahar last month during a nighttime of fury.
As I noted here a …
Rules of Engagement: In Fallujah…and in Florida
With George Zimmerman’s lawyers bailing on him Tuesday, the killer of Florida teen-ager Trayvon Martin seems to be a story that won’t go away any time soon. It also has triggered an interesting commentary from Jon Soltz, …
America’s Medicated Army, 2.0
The Los Angeles Times does a good job of refilling the prescription we first filled nearly four years ago:
The Times, over the weekend:
After two long-running wars with escalating levels of combat stress, more than 110,000 active-duty Army troops last year were taking prescribed antidepressants, narcotics, sedatives, antipsychotics
…
Deployment Wavers
Some Army families think their soldiers deploy too much. Some Army families have it tougher, in some ways: their soldier has never deployed. Army spouse Jenny Williams writes about it in Sunday’s New York Times’ “Modern Love” …