BattlelandKorea
Kim Jong Il’s death leaves the Korean peninsula and the rest of East Asia in a period of great uncertainty. But one of Kim Jong Il’s most dangerous legacies has security implications well beyond the region: he leaves behind a thriving nuclear weapons export business that must now be stopped.
There has been mounting evidence in …
BattlelandKorea
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 …
BattlelandForeign Policy
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 …
BattlelandMilitary
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 …
BattlelandVeterans
I’m in a bit of a celebratory mood. You see, I finished graduate school this week. Like nearly half a million other OEF and OIF veterans (431,000 more or less), I was using VA benefits to attend university. For all my whining and complaining about the VA—particularly the Veterans Benefits Administration—getting my education …
BattlelandMilitary History
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. …
BattlelandMarines
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 …
BattlelandWeapons
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 …
BattlelandArmy
BattlelandIraq
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mBGZiKi9yQ&feature=player_embedded]
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.
BattlelandAfghanistan
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 …
