Last Friday marked the graduation from submariners’ school of the first women slated to board U.S. Navy submarines as official, full-time. members of their crews. They’ll start reporting to their subs as early as this week. Thank God we had the New London Day to tell us about it:
The women who are about to break through a
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Despite our best efforts, we keep hearing that we’re a year out from the next presidential election. Not sure if that means it’s time to start paying attention, but we’ll be citing some of what the candidates say about defense in the coming months. Last week, GOP candidate Mitt Romney went after the Navy:
Let me give you an
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In theses times of layoffs, deficits and budget cuts, anything involving finances that grows at a 37% clip over two years is good news, right? Well, here’s the latest on the pirate front, from Kenya’s The East African:
Ransom payments paid by shipping companies to Somali pirates have reached nearly $110 million this year — a
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The Obama Administration has said it had no choice but to pull out of Iraq by year’s end after the Iraqi parliament made it clear it would not grant U.S. troops immunity from Iraqi law for any alleged wrongdoing. Was that a reason — or an excuse — to come home? John Nagl, of the Center for a New American Security, and I debate the …
Since the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq began, the days spent by U.S. troops in hospitals for alcohol-related problems have skyrocketed, according to a new Pentagon study:
The results of this analysis demonstrate the increasing medical burden that excessive alcohol use is placing on the military health system; this is especially
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A flurry of speculation in recent days that the dreaded doomsday cuts that would hit the Pentagon if the so-called super committee fails to come up with $1.2 trillion in savings are unlikely to happen. Says Saturday’s New York Times, echoing similar reports in Politico and the Washington Post:
Several members of Congress, especially
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The top U.S. commander in Afghanistan fired the No. 2 U.S. trainer of Afghan security forces Friday for “inappropriate public comments” about Afghan President Hamid Karzai. Marine General John Allen relieved Army Major General Peter Fuller after Fuller told the Politico website that Karzai was “isolated from reality”:
The
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It’s costly sending troops all over the world. Especially when a lot of them aren’t riding around in tanks or armored personnel carriers. In years past, the U.S. military has shipped about 75,000 cars to and from the U.S. every year for its troops’ personal use when they, and often their families, are deployed to non-war zones. …
CNN chum Barbara Starr has the inside skinny on the new book purporting to detail the inside skinny of how the Osama bin Laden raid went down – as told by a former SEAL. Author Chuck Pfarrer claims to have spoken to some Navy SEALs who conducted the raid. It seems his story has more holes in it than the post-raid bin Laden.
Bill Ardolino over at Small Wars Journal reports the impact the already-underway U.S. troop pullout from Afghanistan is having in the violent eastern part of the country. He doesn’t like what he sees:
…in truth, the Obama administration’s accelerated drawdown of US forces has undercut a needed infusion of forces from RC South to
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It’s because the Army doesn’t train them to walk along that razor’s edge where gleaning intelligence sometimes is honed into vengeance and retribution. Writes Kevin Bell, a former Army captain now studying the Middle East at Princeton, in the latest issue of Army magazine, published by the service itself:
Unfortunately the
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Fascinating peek inside the latest Atlantic (in a cover story shared with sister pub National Journal) on the perilous security of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons. Payoff grafs:
…instead of moving nuclear material in armored, well-defended convoys, the [Pakistani government] prefers to move material by subterfuge, in civilian-style
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The spectacle now infecting the Pentagon would be humorous, if it weren’t so serious. The notion that the military can cut $450 billion out of its next-decade budget of something like $7 trillion – but not a penny more – suggests an (artillery) shell game’s afoot.
The Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction – the …
