“So you’re not planning on going back into government?” The question came from an executive at a prominent consulting firm, but I (Michael) had heard it often before. At networking events in industries ranging from …
Military
Good News Is Hard to Find
It’s getting tougher to find good news from Afghanistan these days. “Good news has a hard time making it to the headlines these days, but the fact is there is good news,” Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said Monday about the …
Very Social Darwinism
The first Marines have just pivoted toward the Pacific – as President Obama pledged the U.S. military would do – with their initial six-month deployment to Darwin, Australia. That’s a scant 3,700 miles from Beijing. It’s a …
Storm Clouds Gathering Over There…and Back Home
The disasters over the last three months — including American troops urinating on Afghan corpses, burning Qurans, and the massacre of Afghan civilians, including women and children, by at least one American soldier — have …
97%, 40%, 89%, Less Than 1%
How To Make Amends
Army Lieut. Colonel David Oclander knows a thing about trying to turn lemons into lemonade in Afghanistan:
In 2010 I was responsible for the accidental death of two little girls in a remote village in Southern Afghanistan. The events occurred in a village that sat in the middle of a critical valley that the Afghan Army and my
…
Collateral Damage
Seven-hundred and thirty days. That’s the average length of time – two years – that a wounded Marine spends at Camp Lejeune’s Wounded Warrior Battalion before leaving the corps. If you think two years as a patient is too …
“How Do We Get Out of Here?”
Support For Japan’s Military Reaches Post-War High
TOKYO – It’s been a tough year for Japan, what with the earthquake and tsunami, North Korean nukes and China’s increasingly aggressive military. But there’s a silver lining for at least one part of Japanese society – …
A New Approach to the War on Terror?
How come after the successes in the war on terror since 9/11, it seems likes we’re still fighting the war on terror? There seems to be a bit of Lewis Carroll unfolding here:
The faster I go, the behinder I get.
Are the world’s militaries trying to fight a new enemy with old weapons? 1st Lieutenant Rogerio Paiva Cietto, a legal …
“War is hell. War is not going to be a, you know, bowl of cherries every day.”
The Facebook of War
Sometimes anger can spread quietly, a seething, hidden emotion that only occasionally breaks the surface – almost like a shark’s fin headed toward a crowded beach.
That’s what’s happening on Facebook in Afghanistan following the slaughter last month of 17 civilians, allegedly by Staff Sergeant Robert Bales. Time’s John Wendle …
“I really misspoke, to be candid with you…I didn't mean to make that kind of an impression…I did not mean to impugn the military...I misspoke on that front.”