Martin Dempsey

Lucky Shot

Army General Martin Dempsey’s C-17’s fuselage got pockmarked by shrapnel from some overnight shelling while it was parked outside on the tarmac at Afghanistan’s Bagram air base north of Kabul. A couple of airmen were …

Rhetorical Retreat

We’re cutting close to $500 billion out of the next decade’s defense spending. Then there’s another $500 billion to come if sequestration occurs next January because Congress can’t come up with $1.2 trillion in cuts or tax hikes, or some combo of both, over the coming decade.

That prospect of $1 trillion coming out of the …

Flipper Practices for Strait of Hormuz

Army General Martin Dempsey (right), chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, watches a bottlenose dolphin in San Diego on Monday. He was touring the Navy’s Marine Mammal Program with sailors from Explosive Ordnance Disposal Mobile …

Testifying Before Congress: Laughing Through the Pain

Testifying before Congress repeatedly on the defense budget is tough work. “I’ve been in hearings for the last three days — shit, I think I should get some kind of award going through that crap,” Defense Secretary Leon Panetta told airmen in Louisiana on Friday. “I mean, I told General [Marty] Dempsey [chairman of the Joint Chiefs, …

The Changing of the Guard

I would never want to belong to any club that would have someone like me for a member.

The sentiment is usually attributed to Groucho Marx, but as of this week it works for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, too.

Iraq: Assessing Worth

“We’ve paid a great price here,” Army General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, said as the U.S. wrapped up its mission in Iraq on Thursday. “And it has been a price worth paying.”

This led to a piquant …

U.S. Military in Decline, or Just a “Historic Cycle of Resources”?

It’s not a good thing when the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff visits Europe and it leads to a story like this from his own press shop:

It’s not his emphatic answer that counts, of course; it’s the fact that he felt obligated to state, in response to a question, that the U.S. military is not in decline — and then say …

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