TIME has published an interactive map to help readers understand and explore the jumbled, confusing, and sometimes-contradictory burial paperwork that lurks behind the scandal at Arlington National Cemetery.
Some background facts on understanding the scandal at Arlington:
Retired Army colonel Douglas Macgregor has always been a bomb-thrower. His 1997 book on the future of the U.S. Army, Breaking the Phalanx, was equally loved and hated by those inside the service. An innovative battle tactician who some saw as arrogant, he’s one of those guys who colors just a little too much outside the lines for the …
The Congressional Budget Office says killing the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter in favor of buying more F-16s and F-18s would save $26.9 billion in outlays over the next five years. The F-35 is the biggest Pentagon procurement program in history, slated to buy some 2,500 planes for $382 billion over the next 25 years or so.
Troops suffering from traumatic brain injury — one of the signature wounds of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq — have long been eligible for the Purple Heart. But now the Pentagon is clarifying the rules:
Insurgents killed Army Sgt. John Paul Castro April 22 in Afghanistan’s Paktika province. He was on his third combat tour — one to Iraq, two to Afghanistan — in his less-than-seven-year career. Castro’s last mission was “a fight that occurred at distances measured in hand-grenade range, within a complex environment of walled mazes …
Colleague Jyoti Thottam reports from New Delhi on Time‘s Global Spin blog that U.S. ambassador to India Tim Roemer, a former Democratic congressman from Indiana, has quit following India’s scratching of both U.S. warplanes from its shopping list:
We are…deeply disappointed by this news. We look forward to continuing to grow and
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There are reports from the subcontinent that India has eliminated the two U.S.-built planes from its $10 billion competition to buy about 126 fighters. Both the Lockheed F-16 and Boeing F-18 have reportedly been scratched from the list of candidates, in favor of a pair of European-built planes. The F-16 is built in Fort Worth. I was …
…in case you were wondering…
Over the past decade, the Pentagon has been run by a bully, a bureaucrat and, soon, a budget-cutter. Former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld and incumbent Robert Gates had their pluses and minuses, but neither could wield a budget scalpel like Leon Panetta, who President Obama is slated to nominate as the nation’s 23rd defense …
The U.S. military has shied away from body counts of enemy killed since the numbers proved near worthless in Vietnam. But they’re apparently using birthday counts as a yardstick for measuring progress in Afghanistan. Marine Major Gen. Richard Mills, who just returned from a year-long tour in the country’s violent Helmand Province, …
…will be on the cover of this Sunday’s New York Times Magazine:
“Ask them, ‘Do they understand why we shot this dude?’ ” the lieutenant told his interpreter. During their last patrol to Qualaday, soldiers in the platoon had attacked Mullah Allah Dad with rifles and a fragmentation grenade that blew off the lower halves of his
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The last time the Government Accountability Office added up how much the Pentagon and other U.S. agencies were spending building police forces around the world was in 1990. The U.S. government spent $180 million that year. In a new report out today, that total has jumped to $3.5 billion, a nearly 2,000% hike.
On Monday, about 500 prisoners, including more than 100 Taliban commanders, escaped from an Afghan-run jail in Kandahar. On Wednesday, a ticked-off Afghan pilot pulled a gun at Kabul airport, killing eight U.S. troops and a contractor before he was killed, news sources report from Afghanistan. The officer “opened fire on foreign …
