Daniel Houten is in basic training to become an infantryman in the U.S. Army at Fort Benning, Ga. Nothing unusual about another 11 Bravo – except that he recently finished an 18-month tour with the Israeli Defence Forces. The heck with generals and colonels weighing each army’s pluses and minuses – let’s talk to someone who …
Military Training
Well, This Explains Everything…
…you ever wanted to know about how the U.S. and NATO are structured to train Afghan security forces. Wonder if part of the training involves enabling the locals to produce charts like this after we’ve left? h/t Public Intelligence
Self-Fulfilling Prophecy?
This dispatch comes from the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot about an amphibious assault “launched” by Marines during this week’s Bold Alligator exercise along the North Carolina-Virginia coast:
Operating on information gathered
…
Grain-of-Salt Alert
We’re going to be hearing more in the coming weeks and months about how the Afghan army is increasingly ready to shoulder more of the burden of defending its nation from the Taliban. But there’s a Marine assessment from last fall now floating around, and it gives the ground truth a good scrub. Among the lowlights:
Afghans are
…
Who Teaches SEAL Team 6 How to Fight?
The guys who got Osama bin Laden need boxing lessons. According to a contract solicitation issued Feb. 1, the Naval Special Warfare Development Group — that’s SEAL Team 6, to us civilians — wants former special-operations types and other flying fists to school them in “combative training.”
Who’d have thunk the gang …
Haditha’s Denouement
The Marines’ 2005 “massacre” of 24 civilians in the Iraqi town of Haditha began with a bang but ended with a whimper Monday. Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich pled guilty to a single count of negligent dereliction of duty in …
First-Name Basis Only: The U.S. Chair Force
The Air Force has its first two Global Hawk drone pilots groomed from the ground up to fly drones, without ever having flown “real” airplanes first. It’s a new career field for the Air Force, and these guys are the first …
“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.”
“Quiet Heroes”
They’re somewhere on the warfare spectrum between hard-charging infantrymen who live to kill, and combat medics, who live to save lives. They’re the explosive ordnance disposal techs, the guys who risk life and limb to find and …
Viral Atrocities and the Dark Complexity of War
A funny thing happens when you speak with a room full of school children–they have a tendency to say exactly what’s on their minds. When I returned from my first tour in Iraq, just before Christmas 2006, the principals in my …
A Onetime Marine Scout Sniper on What His Comrades Did to the Dead Taliban
Alex Lemons, a former Marine sergeant who deployed to Iraq three times – including once as scout sniper – reflects on the video of four Marines urinating on the corpses of three dead Taliban in Afghanistan:
This is all …
Stupid Soldier, Or Did CNN Just Launch a Revolution?
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TSxm2V8aVQ&feature=share]
Hard to figure out what’s worse – a soldier violating formal and long-standing Pentagon rules by cheering on GOP presidential candidate Ron Paul while in uniform, or those insisting that his interview with CNN was cut off because the network (part of the Time …
Should Women Have to Register With Selective Service?
Over at Time’s Ideas blog, a pair of academics urges that women be compelled to register for the draft. Military recruiters use such registration lists to prospect for young talent. That, in turn, would put more females in …