BattlelandWeapons
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Even though the Obama Administration hasn’t officially declared Taiwan won’t be getting the new F-16s it craves, that hasn’t slowed down Taiwanese animators from commenting on the apparently crashed deal. In English, even. (h/t The Cable)
BattlelandVeterans
Sure, the Munchkins said it about the Wicked Witch of the East.
And the Pentagon personnel chief has finally and officially said it about “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”
BattlelandWeapons
That’s what Air Force Secretary Michael Donley told the Air Force Association’s annual gathering Monday. I’m sure his statement has nothing to do with the fact that his service owns two — bombers and land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles — of the triad’s three legs (the Navy’s submarine-launched missiles being the third). …
BattlelandDrones
Interesting WAPO piece today on advances in drone technology, the basic line being, we’re not all that far from drones doing their killing on their own. Story leads with a description of a successful test wherein drones communicate with each other and zero in on a colored object. You can easily do the extrapolation to …
BattlelandVeterans
Pity the poor grunt who comes back from war with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. He goes online to learn how to cope and is overwhelmed. There’s the Real Warriors website, the My Army OneSource, and the Defense Centers of Excellence (as opposed to the military’s other centers of mediocrity) for Psychological Health & Traumatic Brain …
BattlelandNational Security
A repeal of the military’s “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy takes effect on Tuesday, officially allowing gay and lesbian troops to serve openly for the first time in U.S. history. In the 18 years under the policy, nearly 14,000 gay and lesbian service members were discharged. A new book, Our Time: Breaking the Silence of …
BattlelandVeterans
The Pentagon’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy dies today. It’s an obit I never thought I’d write. It hardly seems possible — as one who covered the debate for close to two decades — that the ban on openly gay men and women serving in uniform is passing into the pages of history. What will military reporters bored with hardware and …
BattlelandTroops
The clock is ticking. If you are reading this, it means the policy known as “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” is no more. As of right now, I no longer have to hide in a web of lies about the details of my personal life. Throughout my time in service under DADT, a week hasn’t gone by where I haven’t been reminded of the policy. It …
BattlelandSouth China Sea
This week on Command Post, John Nagl of the Center for a New American Security and I probe the threat — or whatever it is — posed by China. We’re joined in the discussion by David Finkelstein, retired Army officer and director of China studies at the Pentagon-funded Center for Naval Analyses, and Patrick Cronin, CNAS’s director …
BattlelandNational Security
The President’s plan for deficit reduction, sent today to the Super Committee, collects 25% of its overall spending reductions by bringing the troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan. Bringing them home is probably a good thing, but the budget savings the administration claims will only appear when porcine animals are airborne. The …
BattlelandMilitary Mental Health
First Lady Michelle Obama bounded energetically onto a stage set up last April at a Sears distribution facility in Columbus, Ohio. Shiny black and red lawn tractors stood stacked in storage crates up to the warehouse ceiling behind her, a backdrop intimating hearty manufacturing jobs and bucolic suburban lawns.
Two days earlier, …
BattlelandCounter-Insurgency
Counter-insurgency is so 2007. Everybody knows that Republicans and Democrats have quietly agreed that flooding some dusty foreign land with U.S. troops is too expensive, and we can’t stomach the casualties any longer.
All the cool kids are into counter-terrorism now. (Note to think tanks: It’s no longer hip to tell reporters …
BattlelandVeterans
Despite what Mark Thompson thinks, I am no flying monkey. Like most things in my life I am associating tomorrow’s impending lift of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” to something pilot-related. Right now I’m running the starting-engines checklist and making sure my systems are all good before liftoff. The day after my debut flight in the …
