BattlelandTroops
The guys who got Osama bin Laden need boxing lessons. According to a contract solicitation issued Feb. 1, the Naval Special Warfare Development Group — that’s SEAL Team 6, to us civilians — wants former special-operations types and other flying fists to school them in “combative training.”
Who’d have thunk the gang …
BattlelandAfghanistan
If all U.S. combat troops are going to leave Afghanistan by January 1, 2015, it makes sense that they back away from Afghanistan’s front lines before New Year’s Eve, 2014. Think of it as the dimmer on your dining room light – slowly turn it down instead of plunging from full light to darkness.
BattlelandTaliban
Think Long War Journal has just about the right reaction to this non-news.
BattlelandPeople
TOKYO – Wars can attract some odd, fringe characters, but I never met anyone stranger or more out on the fringe than Jonathan Keith Idema, who died recently in Mexico of complications from AIDS.
A career con artist and military wannabe, Idema showed up early during the war in Afghanistan. He posed variously as a government …
BattlelandAir Force
Bombs hurt too much. That’s why the Air Force has just dropped a 500-pounder from a B-1 with a carbon fiber body – what you and I think of as plastic – instead of a metal case. It’s designed to destroy its target while minimizing the risk of collateral damage. The Pentagon ordered the bomb for urgent use in Central Command’s …
BattlelandIntelligence
It’s like snowballs and snowflakes: if you take enough flakes and press them together, you might end up with a snowball. At least that’s what Battleland thought as it checked out the opening statement of Director of National Intelligence James Clapper to the Senate Select Intelligence Committee Tuesday:
BattlelandChina
Military aviation guru Bill Sweetman has the latest on China’s stealthy J-20 fighter – you know, the one that kicked up a stink a year ago when it flew while then-defense secretary Robert Gates was visiting the Middle Kingdom – and finds some surprises in the latest issue of Defense Technology International:
“While it was …
BattlelandTerrorism
Female suicide bombers are better than their male counterparts, at least in some ways, according to an Army assessment:
Although women make up roughly 15% of the suicide bombers within groups which utilize females, they were
…
BattlelandAir Force
The Air Force has never particularly cared for its A-10 aircraft. After all, its mission is to fly low and slow to defend soldiers in the mud, not fly high and fast to blast enemy aircraft from the sky and guarantee American air …
BattlelandMarines
The sad and sorry case of Marine Lance Corporal Harry Lew has won its first conviction. On Monday, Lance Corporal Jacob Jacoby was sentenced to 30 days in jail – and a reduction in rank to private first class – for his role in the hazing that led Lew to take his own life in Afghanistan last April 3.
The government urged Jacoby …
BattlelandCounter-Insurgency
It’s not – surprise! – what you think:
…We see insurgency as a form of collective, goal-focused activity that comes about when nefarious people exploit the weaknesses of a political system…And since insurgency is
…
BattlelandIEDs
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIS-MOcSCZw]
We’ve seen flying robots – drones – spying on the enemy, and beefy tracked robots disabling IEDs. So why not the ultimate traveling ‘bot – one that’s thrown by soldiers? Don’t laugh – the Pentagon’s anti-IED shop is planning to send 400 tossbots to Afghanistan …
BattlelandMilitary Mental Health
