Tom Barnett raised some eyebrows Wednesday with his grim prognosis on Battleland on the U.S. role in Afghanistan:
It’s a dependency – pure and simple. The longer we stay, the more we’ll infantilize the system. Ten years in and virtually everything we’ve set about to create is still described as “fragile” – meaning it collapses and
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The debate about whether President Obama’s war in Libya threatens to violate the 1973 War Powers Resolution is interesting because it exposes a bit of potential hypocrisy on the part of the president. Here is rule-of-law Obama, a former senator, at risk of violating the law and trampling on the authority of the legislative branch of …
Waiting on the Obama speech explaining this one.
Guardian piece Monday predicts that current US-Afghan talks will cement a very long-term deal on presence [hat tip to World Politics Review Media Roundup].
American and Afghan officials are locked in increasingly acrimonious secret talks about a long-term security agreement which
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This is a photograph that NPR photographer David Gilkey took at a military base in Afghanistan. Tom Bowman, NPR’s ace Pentagon correspondent, says “This is NOT a joke.”
As a top Army psychiatrist until last year, I always found the Army’s silence about guns’ role in our rising suicide rate disquieting. The Army is committed to lowering the rate of suicide. But there’s a curious third rail that is seldom publicly discussed: the risks of suicide by firearm. Approximately 70 percent of Army and …
First, the Army ditches the black beret for most soldiers at most times. Now it’s abandoning the wearing of combat fatigues inside the Pentagon. “Is it bad that this excites me more than the death of Bin Laden?” one soldier, apparently from Fort Drum, N.Y., writes on an Army Facebook page. “Kidding…Kind of.”
A decade after 9/11, …
Soldiers call them “Doc,” but Scott McGaugh calls the military’s medics “Battlefield Angels” in his new book by the same name. Not actually doctors — but not really nurses, either –they’re out on the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq, armed with guns as well as gauze, and are usually the first ones tending to the physical and …
It’s probably not much of a surprise that a majority of Republican presidential candidates suggested during CNN’s debate last night that if elected, they would go back to the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. But they sounded oddly out of touch, since on the very same day, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said the transition to …
It’s without an ounce of wistfulness that I bid adieu to one of the most ridiculous and unpopular pieces of Army-issue equipment–the black beret. For the past decade, when soldiers were not in Iraq or Afghanistan, they suffered through parades, formations and all manner of long walks with sweaty, misshapen plops of wool covering …
As the Pentagon’s “efficiencies review” unfolds, one Cold War mainstay of the US military posture is inevitably going to be retired – namely, the land-based portion of the strategic missile triad. The Pentagon is tasked with coming up with $400 billion in savings over the next decade, and so this long-discussed option (and old Mark …
Soon after Bush administration officials realized they had no plan on what to do after invading Iraq, they figured out they would have to do some reconstruction there. Then they figured out they needed money to pay for that. Then they decided they needed cash. Lots of it.
They literally trucked $20 billion in cash via tractor-trailers …
Every once in awhile, a spate of stories makes you sit up and pay attention. A trio just flitted across my screen:
— Vietnam wants U.S. help in defusing its growing tensions with China over Beijing’s encroachment into the resource-rich South China Sea, the Financial Times reports.
— Great Britain no longer has a navy capable of …
