Steven Metz, one of the Army War College’s best brains, has scrapped a trip to the British International Studies Association conference in Edinburgh, Scotland, because the U.S. Army’s European Command told him he couldn’t …
Military
Veterans: Two Good Pieces of News…in a Single Day!
U.S. military veterans don’t get an awful lot of good news, but a pair of good-news items was tossed over our transom on Tuesday. We felt they were worth sharing:
First, homeless among veterans is on the decline, falling by 12% during the year ending January 2011. Secondly, almost 30% of federal government hires in fiscal 2011 went to …
Michèle Flournoy Departs
If Michèle Flournoy were a man, no one outside of nerdy defense circles would have noted her announcement Monday that she will be leaving the Pentagon’s No. 3 post – the under secretary of defense for policy – come …
Grim News: Reaper Down
A week after the U.S. lost a drone over the Afghan-Iran frontier, the Air Force announced Tuesday morning that one of its MQ-9 Reaper drones crashed at the Seychelles International Airport earlier in the day. “The MQ-9 was not …
Somalia: A Navy Without Boats
We’ve reported frequently on the Somali piracy infesting the Indian Ocean. The good news is that the Somali navy wants to do something about it. The bad news, according to a fascinating but dispiriting account in …
Is Iraq Headed for a Crackup?
Patrick Cockburn, one of the best reporters now covering the Middle East, recently described the growing tensions in Iraq over the question of sharing its oil wealth among its constituent regions. Specifically, Exxon is
…
Is Leon Panetta the Right Man to be Secretary of Defense?
For several months, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta has been using extreme rhetoric to characterize cuts in the Pentagon budget beyond the $450 billion reduction over ten years he has already accepted. With the failure of the …
“By nature it is an all-consuming job and it does take a toll on the family.”
“With respect to the drone inside of Iran, I'm not going to comment on intelligence matters that are classified. As has already been indicated, we have asked for it back. We'll see how the Iranians respond.”
Newtonian Physics
Electro-magnetic pulse. EMP. A nuclear shock wave. The ultimate doomsday weapon. Whatever you call it, the notion of detonating a nuclear blast high in the atmosphere to fry the electronics of what is underneath has been a …
Capturing Saddam
Seems kind of funny that the same month we’re pulling out of Iraq, retired Army lieutenant colonel Steve Russell is releasing We Got Him! A memoir of the hunt and capture of Saddam Hussein. Russell, who served 21 years in the …
Burned by the Boss: How To Tell We’ve Been at War Too Long
There are lots of signs the nation, now amid its longest war ever in Afghanistan – and just finishing up a second lengthy military campaign in Iraq – has been fighting too long. Sure, the budget deficits are one sign. So is …
Collateral Damage
As the lobbying heavyweights gobble up newspaper pages and local airtime in Washington warning that impending budget cuts are going to send the U.S. into an economic and military tailspin from which recovery will be impossible, …