The fuse that is North Korea is sputtering again with the news that King Jon Il has died. “This is a watershed moment,” says Victor Cha, a former White House Korea expert now with the Center for Strategic and International …
National Security
The Question of German Power Returns to Europe
Since the middle of the 19th Century, the central questions in European politics have been the closely-connected questions of nationalism and the rise of German power. As my good friend and eminent historian Gabriel Kolko shows in this brilliant essay, the post-war solutions of NATO and the European Union, together with the exigencies …
Bullet Dodged
Pilot Error
The Air Force released a pair of probes into high-profile airplane accidents last week. Both play peek-a-boo with that phrase aviators hate: pilot error.
The first blames an F-22 pilot for crashing as he apparently – and …
Is War Obsolete?
This question surfaces anew every several years. Certainly, the advent – now there’s a perversion of the word – of nuclear weapons, despite all their challenges, seems to have placed great-power wars on hold. But Joshua S. …
The Few. The Proud. The Increasingly Costly.
Something has changed in the Marine Corps over the past generation. “We cost 5% of the DoD budget — a nickel out of the defense dollar,” General Carl Mundy, the Marine commandant, bragged to Congress in 1993. “In return, the …
Godspeed, Mr. Withington
The last man present at the birth of the Air Force’s B-52 – which, God bless the BUFF, is still flying real-world missions nearly 60 years after its first flight – has died at 94. Not only did Holden Withington help create …
Army Drill-Sergeant School Boss: Missing In Action
Is This Any Way to Run a Country?
White House: We’ll Gloat If We Want
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When we suggested Thursday that it might be nice if people toned down their political rhetoric for awhile over the end of the U.S. military’s role in Iraq, we didn’t have President Obama in mind. Turns out, we should have.
Meanwhile, Back in Afghanistan…
We’ve spent a day noting the formal end to our nine-year distraction in Iraq. Now let’s return to our first post-9/11 war in Afghanistan, where this active-duty Army colonel doesn’t pull many punches. Paul Yingling writes …
PFC Bradley Manning (cont.)
Army Private First Class Bradley Manning’s Article 32 hearing begins at Fort Meade, Md., Friday – 18 months after his arrest for allegedly leaking hundreds of thousands of classified documents to WikiLeaks.
Because the …
Iraq: Assessing Worth
“We’ve paid a great price here,” Army General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, said as the U.S. wrapped up its mission in Iraq on Thursday. “And it has been a price worth paying.”
This led to a piquant …