The Navy’s Military Sealift Command is sniffing around the nation’s shipping industry to see if there’s someone who might be able to help the service’s SEALs get around.
Lots of this is secret, of course, but the Pentagon …
Troops
Mesopotamia’s Mental Medevacs Mounted In War’s Final Years
Here’s a pair of fascinating Pentagon charts. The one on the left is for U.S. male troops medically evacuated from the Iraq war over the past eight years; the one on the right tracks the same among female U.S. troops (more than 50,000 of both genders left this way). For about the first four years of the war, battlefield and other …
Military Migraines
Combat gets blamed for all sorts of ills. Some are obvious, like physical wounds. Others are less visible, and range from traumatic brain injury to post-traumatic stress disorder. Well, “deployment to southwest Asia” – that would be Afghanistan and/or Iraq –apparently also triggers headaches.
“Factors that appeared to be …
“Other Than That, How Was Your Flight?”
Training for war – flying a jet fighter at low altitudes, for example – can be an unforgiving business. That’s the bottom line from an F-15 crash last October 24 in Nevada. The pilot wasn’t badly hurt, but the $32 million plane was totaled.
Accident investigators said they were unable to determine the cause of the crash, …
The Nearly $1 Million-a-Year Soldier
The Pentagon’s top bean-counter was ready when a senator asked him a simple question Tuesday: how much does it cost to keep a single American soldier in Afghanistan for a year? “Right now,” Robert Hale, the Pentagon comptroller responded, “about $850,000 per soldier.”
That’s akin to the $400-per-gallon cost of fuel, and $30-per-gallon …
“Good Morning, Afghanistan!”
Second U.S. Troop Killed in Afghan Interior Ministry ID’d
Army National Guard Major Robert J. Marchanti II, 48, was a former elementary-school gym teacher just outside Baltimore. He and Air Force Lt. Col. John Darin Loftis were working inside a small room at the National Police Coordination Center in the Afghan interior ministry Saturday afternoon when a ministry driver entered and killed …
Sequestration: A Big Word – And a Bigger Problem That Demands Action Now
There is not much policymakers in Washington can agree about lately. As evidenced by the lack of a Congressional budget resolution to fund the government that is on a continuing resolution autopilot, to the Super Committee’s failure to agree on what to cut, it is hard to find bipartisan consensus.
This is especially startling …
Trial by Snow: Training Navy SEALs to Deal with the Cold
Turns out the coolest Navy SEALs, those belonging to SEAL Team 6 (or the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, as they are officially known) need special training to operate in the cold.
“Tipping Point?”
So just how close to the tipping point – that’s the phase heard most over the past several days – is the U.S.-led military mission in Afghanistan? Not close, according to the Obama Administration. Remember, this was the “good …
A Generous, But Dead, U.S. Military Officer
Air Force Lieut. Colonel John Darin Loftis, who was killed Saturday inside the Afghanistan interior ministry, was a father of two. He spoke to his mother three days before he died, on his 44th birthday. A proficient speaker of Pashto, one of the common local languages in Afghanistan, he’d been given a Pashto name during an earlier …
Killed at Their Desks: The Growth of the (Human) IED Threat — and Mutual Mistrust — in Afghanistan
Saturday’s killing of two U.S. military officers inside the highly-protected Afghan Interior Ministry in Kabul by a Taliban-allied shooter is an apt microcosm of the decade-long conflict. The Pentagon was quick to label the …
Scapegoating Doctors
This is a hard post to write. It is with deep sadness and conflicted feelings that I have learned about the controversy on PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) diagnoses at Madigan Army Medical Center. I want to defend my former …