Military
We Don’t Know Precisely What It Means, Either
…the Navy awarded this $15 million contract (click on it to enlarge) Thursday. “The program seeks to maximize the financial value of the properties and leverage that value with private sector expertise to offset the cost of ongoing operations or obviate the need for capital investments,” the announcement says. Obviate the need for …
Another Way to Cut a Trillion
This thing is beginning to snowball. Here’s Kori Schake penning a piece in the just-released Winter 2012 issue of Orbis, the quarterly journal of the Foreign Policy Research Institute, entitled Margin Call: How to Cut a Trillion From Defense. She doesn’t say it is going to be easy, and that it means real change:
The American
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Talking About Talking To The Taliban
It seems to be a hot issue, for reasons that aren’t completely clear. Everyone involved knows the U.S. has to come to some sort of accommodation with at least some elements of the Taliban, even if it has to begin in Qatar. …
Army Suicide: The Struggle Continues
The rash of suicides among Army troops, including reservists, abated for the first time in four years in 2011, the service reported Thursday. The total of 278 was a 9% drop from the year before. But the toll continued to climb in the active-duty force, rising from 159 in 2010 to 164 last year.
A pair of leading indicators of …
Murderous Vets: Casting Aspersions
Better Late Than Never: The Afghan War Handbook
After a decade of war in Afghanistan, there’s a new guidebook out on just who we’re fighting. It’s The Afghan Way of War by Robert Johnson, Oxford historian. It is his subtitle – How and Why They Fight – that should be required reading for the leaders of both the U.S. and U.K., as well as the grunts on Afghan soil. …
Getting Disability Pay to the Vets Who Need it
The Department of Veterans Affairs’ inspector general is out with a report assessing how well the VA’s regional office in White River Junction, Vt., does when it comes to awarding disability pay to vets:
True, it’s only a half-million dollars in over-payments. But when you extrapolate that sum – White River Junction is …
Tightening Pentagon Budgets…
…are apparently forcing the Defense Department-run high schools in Europe to “recondition and paint football equipment” for their players:
Defusing the Iranian Crisis
Attached herewith is an essay written by William R. Polk outlining a strategy for diffusing the Iranian crisis. I am posting it with his permission. He is a former State Department official — and historian and foreign policy …
About That Trillion-Dollar Cut
Seems all the bluster about cutting military spending by $1 trillion over the next decade – about 15% — isn’t the hair-on-fire moment that Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and his congressional allies have been …
Tailhook Woes (cont.)
It’s progress, of a sort, when the Navy’s tailhook woes are linked to an actual tailhook – the hook that grabs the arresting cable on an aircraft carrier and lets the plane land safely – and not the debauchery that was common at the Tailhook Assocation’s annual gatherings. That kind of Tailhook trouble exploded into a …
“Cross-Domain Synergy -- the complementary vice merely additive employment of capabilities in different domains such that each enhances the effectiveness and compensates for the vulnerabilities of the others -- to establish superiority in some combination of domains that will provide the freedom of action required by the mission.”