Greg Mortenson and his book, Three Cups of Tea, may literally be, alas, a parable, or perhaps a fable, for the modern age. Now that 60 Minutes has asserted that his accounts of his days in deepest Pakistan were fabricated or exaggerated, there are the denials from the author and the bitter aftertaste of another idol smashed.
Of …
Mark Thompson’s earlier post about the contradictions in U.S. policy and strategy in Libya is likely to become the story line of the week. The story goes like this: President Obama a) pushed intervention in Libya to avoid a civilian massacre b) restricted that intervention to an air war, and then c) hamstrung that air war so badly that …
Ricardo Sanchez, who ran the ground war in Iraq in 2003 and 2004, is thinking of running for the U.S. Senate from his home state of Texas, McClatchy Newspapers report:
Democrats appear to have recruited retired Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez to run for the U.S. Senate in Texas, setting the stage for a potentially competitive race in 2012
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Welcome to our lean, mean writing machine. Today is Battleland’s debut. It’ll be fattening up shortly (it better!) as my Time colleagues and outside commentators begin posting. And you begin commenting. I’ve been covering the military for more than 30 years here in D.C. — ever since Harold Brown was serving as defense secretary in the …
So the Air Force’s latest and greatest warplane – the $412 million per copy F-22 – has now been MIA in Iraq, Afghanistan and – most surprisingly – in imposing the no-fly zone over Libya. How come? Especially when it was already in the neighborhood on the eve of that conflict? It raises a whole new version of the so-called …
That’s the take-no-prisoners title of the lead editorial in Sunday’s Washington Post. It could have been written by many of the national-security wonks I’ve spoken to in the past several weeks, both inside and outside of government:
Let’s see if we can sum this up: Mr. Obama is insisting that NATO’s air operation, already four weeks
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Just how closely should the nation be screening its troops for mental fitness before they’re shipped off to war? We are seeing, again and again, that bad things — depression, divorce, suicide, murder — can happen in combat’s wake. If there is a way to weed out — that may not be the right word — the folks who might be driven to such …
When Gen. George Casey stepped down as the Army’s top officer last week, he said his four years as chief of staff had been dedicated to rebalancing a force warped by 10 years of war. “We anticipate getting to a point by the end of this year where we will begin executing a more balanced and sustainable deployment tempo with a transformed, …
Traumatic brain injury — TBI — is one of the current plagues affecting the U.S. military. Medical care has gotten so good that troops can survive even a penetrating brain wound. But they’re never the same. That’s what led Shannon Maxwell to write Our Daddy Is Invincible for her two kids, 7 and 10, after her husband — their father …
As Defense Secretary Robert Gates heads toward the exit, there’s a blivet‘s worth of challenges facing his successor. Unlike Gates, the next secretary of defense won’t be following the unpopular Don Rumsfeld. Just as Jerry Ford benefited from not being Richard Nixon, Gates benefited from not being Rumsfeld. Despite such historical …
The Air Force has been using a pair of C-130 aircraft as crop-dusters over Utah, trying to eradicate halogeton. That’s a salt-loving, invasive weed that complicates the service’s bomb tests and can make recovering unexploded bombs more dangerous. The planes have been spraying 1,200 acres of the Utah Test and Training Range from about …
Speaking, as we just did, of military-spending reviews, Time has a compelling piece in its latest issue detailing just how the nation could save $1 trillion out of the $7 trillion it is planning to spend on military forces over the coming decade. The author asserts real cuts will not happen until the White House and Congress get the …
The Pentagon is forever reviewing everything — from lead-free bullets (a more environmentally-friendly way of killing) to improving chow for America’s ever-expanding Army (on a per-capita BMI scale, of course). But the biggie – for the past generation of Pentagon denizens – has been the QDR, or Quadrennial Defense Review. It’s …
