David Ignatius, the hard-core foreign-affairs columnist for the Washington Post, doesn’t think much of Thursday’s announcement that the Obama Administration has approved sending armed Predator drones to attack targets in Libya.
His bottom line:
My quick reaction, as a journalist who has chronicled the growing use of drones, is that
…
Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Thursday that armed U.S. Predator drones have begun flying missions over Libya. It’s a small bump in U.S. military capability in hopes of blunting the expanding political problem caused by Muammar Gaddafi’s continued attacks on civilians despite a U.N. resolution calling for their protection. The …
Time colleague Bobby Ghosh recalls his friend, Chris Hondros, on our Global Spin blog. Chris was killed Wednesday in Misrata, Libya, along with Tim Hetherington. Brave war reporters like Bobby are nothing compared to the guys who go in to make the pictures of conflict around the world that we rely on to try to come to grips with such …
Time photo editor Paul Moakley reflects on the death Wednesday of Restrepo director Tim Hetherington in Misrata, Libya.
The New York Times is reporting Thursday morning that the Libyan war – launched by Americans with their fingers crossed – will likely have “no quick and easy end.” It’s hard to recall those days in early March when the rebels were on the move and U.S.-led air attacks, later joined by NATO, were viewed as little more than a armed …
Tony Cordesman is one of the most prolific national-security analysts working these days. The Center for Strategic and International Studies scholar is important because he doesn’t live in the fringe, as do so many of his contemporaries. He inhabits, generally, a sensible middle, and imbues his work with a gravitas based on his wide …
While the third-largest Libyan city, the rebel stronghold of Misrata, continues to burn — ignited by Muammar Gaddafi — the West continues to fiddle. Rhetorical war rages between European capitals and Washington, even as a growing number of European nations — including Britain, France and Italy — say they will be dispatching dozens of …
Just this week, Department of Defense (DoD) officials informed Congress that 95 weapons programs have increased in cost, to the tune of $64 billion. A primary driver of these cost increases: production cuts and the loss of economies of scale. Programs affected include the Marine Corps’ Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle, the Air Force’s …
OK….as the stalemate grinds on in Libya, maybe we should discard the charade that the U.S. stopped playing an active role over Muammar Gaddafi’s nation since it handed off control of the operation to NATO a couple of weeks ago.
Here are a couple of numbers to keep in mind:
— U.S. warplanes are flying one out of every three …
An interesting Reuters ‘special report‘ brings into relief some of the ironies of the current air war over Libya: the French strike craft pummeling Libyan targets over the past month were allegedly on offer to the Gaddafi regime not long ago. At an air show outside Tripoli in 2009, according to photographs taken by Dutch military …
So the Air Force’s latest and greatest warplane – the $412 million per copy F-22 – has now been MIA in Iraq, Afghanistan and – most surprisingly – in imposing the no-fly zone over Libya. How come? Especially when it was already in the neighborhood on the eve of that conflict? It raises a whole new version of the so-called …
That’s the take-no-prisoners title of the lead editorial in Sunday’s Washington Post. It could have been written by many of the national-security wonks I’ve spoken to in the past several weeks, both inside and outside of government:
Let’s see if we can sum this up: Mr. Obama is insisting that NATO’s air operation, already four weeks
…
The New York Times is reporting this morning that the U.S. and its allies are quietly seeking a nation that might become a new home for Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi in exile. There’s just one teeny-tiny complication (beyond the fact that he has shown no willingness to pull up his [tent] stakes and leave):
