Military leaders have been telling us for years that troops need to spend more time at home between combat deployments – dwell time, as it’s known – to help keep the detritus of war: depression, suicides, divorce, post-traumatic stress disorder and other mental ailments, at bay:
When deployed for 12 months, we must get them to
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It was only a couple of months ago we noted that the Senate had urged the military services to pare back their geysers of competing programs fighting with one another to fight the plague of post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injuries afflicting U.S. troops. “They’ve launched dozens of programs with multiple …
Ever yawn while at the wheel, maybe slumber a little bit at a stop sign – and tap the car in front of you? I’m sure it has happened to a lot of us. Just be thankful you weren’t at the controls of an F-16 when it happened. Back in July, one U.S. F-16 ran into the other at South Korea’s Kusan air base. Thankfully, both were on …
The military has long known that many troops won’t take advantage of the roster of mental-health care options the military offers. That’s because they fear the stigma it might generate could hurt their career prospects. Does that aversion contribute to the military’s increased suicide rate? Dr. Margaret Harrell, a Center for a …
The Pentagon just announced three contracts (above, click on it to enlarge) totaling up to $7 billion for Meals-Ready-to-Eat for troops – and victims of humanitarian disasters – to eat through 2016. Sure, MREs are getting tastier, but $7 billion? We just called the folks who bought them – Philadelphia’s Defense Logistics Agency …
The U.S. is shipping 250 Marines to Australia by the middle of next year, a force that eventually will grow to 2,500. U.S. Air Force units will increasingly cycle in an out of bases in northern Australia – a full Marine Air-Ground Task Force. A MAGTF — pronounced mag-taff — is the Marines’ key unit for conducting missions across …
Eliot Cohen is one of those Washington, D.C., polymaths who, when he’s not professing at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, is putting together the Gulf War Air Power Survey or the already-classic Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen, and Leadership in Wartime. In his spare time, he writes books that are …
It’s hard for most Americans to realize, as we noted in our cover story this week, that there is a major war involving U.S. troops underway in Afghanistan. It’s a splotchy kind of war, with no well-defined front. That makes it a difficult war to cover. Sometimes we have to rely on the folks wearing military uniforms to give us a …
If you haven’t been paying attention, this is where we stand on the Pentagon budget battle:
1. The Pentagon has already agreed to cut $450 billion over the coming decade from the roughly $7 trillion it had planned on getting. “These cuts are difficult and will require us to take some risks, but they are manageable,” Defense …
It seems the toilets aboard the aircraft carrier have been balky, and too often MIA, over the first six months of its maiden voyage. Reports the Virginian-Pilot:
“It definitely affects my morale,” said [Petty Officer 1st Class Richard] Frakes, an aviation mechanic. “When I was unable to relieve myself for two days, I was irate to
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Defense Secretary Leon Panetta writes Congress that the “doomsday” cuts that will befall the Defense Department if sequestration occurs will force the military to eliminate one of the legs of its strategic nuclear triad – as if this is a bad thing.
The triad – that collection of land-based missiles, bombers and …
That’s the headline on the front page of Tuesday’s Washington Post, over a story by Greg Jaffe. He traces much of what we reported in this week’s cover story, An Army Apart. But he drills down into the mindset of troops, who have concluded the gap we reported on has curdled into pity among Americans for the troops fighting the …
As the nation comes to grips with its budgetary shortfalls, tough questions need to be asked about dubious, squirrely investments that – even in flush times – would have seemed dubious. Over the weekend, David Willman at the Los Angeles Times told an amazing tale about our nearly half-billion-dollar investment in a smallpox …
