Rocket Science: Unexpected Aeroshell Degradation
“Let’s Bring Back the Draft”
Tom Ricks, veteran Pentagon correspondent and author, calls for doing away with the all-volunteer force in Sunday’s Washington Post:
It has been too successful. Our relatively small and highly adept military has made it all too easy for our nation to go to war — and to ignore the consequences. The drawbacks of the all-volunteer force
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Beyond the Headlines: Care With Compassion
I visited Joint Base Lewis-McCord in Washington state last week, to attend the retirement of a good friend of mine, another Army psychiatrist who has served for many years.
I have blogged before about my dismay at the allegations swirling around the post’s Madigan Army Medical Center. But this was my first time back to Madigan in …
How Not to Buy Weapons
This simple graphic, from a Government Accountability Office report released Friday, shows how weapons should be developed:
After all, it makes sense: you don’t start building something until you’ve developed the technology it needs to work. Then you develop the weapon. Only after those two steps do you begin bending metal, as they say, …
Life On the Front Lines, Back Home
My heart sinks to my toes…my head spins with worries: is it someone I didn’t call back? Is it someone I couldn’t get onto my calendar for four weeks? Oh, God – please don’t let the name be familiar, please…
The last …
Battleland Diary, April 14-20
TIME’s photo editors bring you the best pictures from the front lines and home.
“Don’t Ask, Don’t Kill”
There’s a lesson in here, somewhere: early Saturday, a Marine stabbed another Marine, just down the street from the Marine commandant’s house in Washington, D.C. Marine guards tried to break up the fight, and apprehended the suspect. Marine Michael Joseph Poth, 20, apparently stabbed fellow Marine Philip Bushong, 23, after Poth used an …
iPod, You Pod, He, She, It Pods
So the Air Force announces this contract Friday afternoon. The only description of what’s being bought and/or upgraded are “pods.” C’mon Air Force: Aim High, and tell us taxpayers what you’re buying for $53 million.
Northrop Grumman Technical Services, Herndon, Va., is being awarded a $52,848,888 fixed-price-incentive-firm,
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“On the locked MH [mental health] units, we found that back hallways were not continuously observable by staff and that ceiling tiles were removable, exposing potential anchor points for hanging.”
Dry British F-35 Humour
The Oxbridge lads at the Economist write an editorial this week on the world’s costliest weapons system ever: the Pentagon’s own F-35 fighter. And while it doesn’t quite rise to sublime Benny Hill quality, it’s pretty close to Monty Python.
Of Enemy Dead and Cameras
The guys over at the Long War Journal have an interesting take on the latest batch of photos showing U.S. troops posing with dead insurgents in Afghanistan:
…if you’re an editor who is going to vault these pictures to the top of the news cycle, don’t dwell overlong on the failings of a few US soldiers – gratuitously show it all, the
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“Beam Me Up, Scotty!”
We started this week noting the Pentagon’s perpetual quest to field a military-significant laser — laser weapons are only five years away (and always will be) — and end it with a new report from the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments: Changing the Game: The Promise of Directed-Energy Weapons.
Warns the last sentence in …