“We believe that it will be impossible to make a rational assessment of the role of military force in any overall Iran strategy, without first carefully assessing the likely benefits and costs of military action.”
Pentagon
When the No-Fly Zone Didn’t Fly
Reporter Michael Lewis profiles President Obama in the latest Vanity Fair. He views the President through the prism of basketball, and the F-15 weapons officer whose plane crashed in in Libya 18 months ago.
But the most …
A (Former) SEAL Speaks Out…About (Former) SEALs Speaking Out
No Easy Day is different.
SEAL Team Six operators have, until now, always been very tight-lipped about current operations. Yes, there have been revealing books about SEAL Team Six — Rogue Warrior and Inside SEAL Team Six are …
Stars Wars Gets More Complicated
An august panel of graybeards at the National Research Council has concluded that the U.S. should deploy interceptor missiles along the East Coast to defend against incoming missiles from rogue states like Iran.
11 Years Later: The Unquiet Hero
Watching ex-SEAL Matt Bissonnette on 60 Minutes was equal parts fascinating and disturbing.
Eleven years since the horror of 9/11, some of us watched, transfixed, as someone who gave his word never to write of what he had …
Graduating Into War
The U.S. Naval Academy’s Class of 2002 was just beginning its senior year on September 11, 2001. Thirty-three of its 965 members this week will be publishing In the Shadow of Greatness: Voices of Leadership, Sacrifice, and …
Buying Peace
Winning a war can be tricky business, especially if you’re a U.S. soldier outfitted with the U.S. military’s formal guide for reintegrating the Taliban into a peaceful Afghan society. This is is different from the money the …
Honoring Intrepidity
There was a special eight-page “advertising supplement” tucked into the rear of Sunday’s Washington Post. “Section R” was crammed with the details and history of those who have displayed enough “conspicuous gallantry and …
Still No Luck for the V-22 in Japan
TOKYO – If it wasn’t for bad luck, the Marines’ V-22 would have no luck at all – at least not in Japan.
More than 100,000 people turned out on Okinawa on Sunday to protest the planned deployment of the Marines’ new …
“Tonight we pay tribute to the Americans who still serve in harm's way. We are forever in debt to a generation whose sacrifice has made this country safer and more respected. We will never forget you, and so long as I'm commander-in-chief, we will sustain the strongest military the world has ever known.”
1,000 Words
The top U.S. commander in Afghanistan issued a statement Thursday detailing the steps now being taken to curb so-called insider attacks that have killed 45 allied troops so far this year.
Marine General John Allen’s statement contains no news, but its length alone makes clear the U.S. and its allies, including Afghanistan, view the …
Iraq: How the CIA Says It Blew It on Saddam’s WMD
Now that we’re out of Iraq, the CIA has come clean on how it came to be bamboozled about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) ferrets over at the National Security Archive (NSA) …
“For all of our tactical valor, and the hedgehog nature of how our incredibly tough, brave and committed small units go about the missions we give them [in Afghanistan], once again our strategic compass is unmoored -- in part, maybe largely because we rotate 2-star and 3-star HQ constantly, leaving no enduring frame of reference for what we are doing.”