If trans-gendered troops can have their own website, guess it’s only fair that the Veterans of Foreign Wars now has its first post created by and for women.
Military
Afghan Jailbreak
Meanwhile, back in the here and now, the Taliban staged a massive jailbreak in Kandahar early Monday that spirited at least 476 prisoners out of the biggest prison in southern Afghanistan. “We do not know if the tunnel was dug from outside or inside the prison,” the warden, Gen. Ghulam Dastagir Mayar, told the New York Times. With allies …
Libya: What’s the Deal with the Tribes?
On Global Spin, I examine news from over the weekend that tribes in Misratah’s environs are being brought in to supposedly help bring an end to the city’s bloody siege. Tribal structures are important in Libya, but I reckon their capabilities and influence have been overstated.
A Question For the Obama Administration:
Last week, Defense Secretary Robert Gates argued that President Obama’s order to cut $400 billion from national-security spending over the next 12 years will force the U.S. military to curtail some of its far-flung duties. “This needs to be a process that is driven by the analysis,” he said, “as well as missions that our elected …
A Trillion Here, a Trillion There
When I started covering the military shortly after the War of 1812, million was a word you heard a lot. Then, once Cap the Knife (for his budget-cutting prowess during his Nixon Administration tenure running the Office of Management and Budget) became Cap the Ladle Weinberger when he ran the Reagan Pentagon, billion became the big …
Overdosing on `Tea’
The Predator Feud Drones On
A peek inside the tensions between Islamabad and Washington over the CIA’s use of armed Predator drones over Pakistan to take out Taliban operatives in safe havens along the Af-Pak frontier, from Time’s Omar Waraich in the Pakistani capital.
Welcome Home, Soldier…
The gap between our publicly professed pride for our returning troops – and how they actually are treated when they need help – never ceases to amaze. The latest on this care chasm is explained on the front page of Saturday’s Washington Post. It details the woes faced by veterans who believe they have been short-changed by the …
Libya: McCain On What a Political Solution Would Look Like
Asked Friday in Benghazi what a “polical resolution” to the Libyan crisis would look like, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., had a brief answer:
I think the political resolution is one that calls for Gadhafi to be one of three places: with his friend Hugo Chavez [in Venezuela], in the International Criminal Court [in the Hague], or with Hitler
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Libya: Status Report
…speaking of Libya, colleague Ishaan Tharoor brings us up to date about a rare win for the rebels in the western part of the country, also at Global Spin…
Libya: “Progress,” By The Numbers
The U.S. military has shied away from enemy body counts during wartime since Vietnam. Enemy attrition, not so much (attrition, noun — a wearing down or weakening of resistance, especially as a result of continuous pressure or harassment). So Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, rolled out this new preferred …
Electronic Agent Orange?
Those of you of a certain vintage will recall how the U.S. military dumped dioxin-laced Agent Orange defoliant all over Vietnam in hopes of an instant autumn — stripping leaves from the jungle so the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese couldn’t hide. But the cost of chemical defoliation was so high, and so tragic, that an electronic …
Post Pundit: Thumbs-Down on Drones for Libya
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
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