BattlelandWeapons
Just this week, Department of Defense (DoD) officials informed Congress that 95 weapons programs have increased in cost, to the tune of $64 billion. A primary driver of these cost increases: production cuts and the loss of economies of scale. Programs affected include the Marine Corps’ Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle, the Air Force’s …
BattlelandNational Security
UK Foreign Secretary William Hague announced today that the UK will double down on the rag-tag Libyan rebel leadership in Benghazi, expanding the team of British military officers there and contributing telecommunications equipment and protective body armor to the rebel effort to topple Muammar Gaddafi.
But the effort is still …
BattlelandTroops
Here’s a sentence in a new report, The Psychological Costs of War: Military Combat and Mental Health, that should give any soldier, or soldier’s loved one, or taxpayer, pause:
Our preferred estimates suggest that combat-induced PTSD in the Global War on Terror imposes two-year costs of $1.5 to $2.7 billion on the U.S. health care system.
BattlelandWeapons
They’re called “SARs” inside the Pentagon, and they’re not referring to what the doctors called severe acute respiratory syndrome nearly a decade ago. Nope, these are the Pentagon’s quarterly reports on how well the military is doing at buying weapons. The latest SARs – it stands for Selected Acquisition Reports in the Pentagon – …
BattlelandWeapons
OK….as the stalemate grinds on in Libya, maybe we should discard the charade that the U.S. stopped playing an active role over Muammar Gaddafi’s nation since it handed off control of the operation to NATO a couple of weeks ago.
Here are a couple of numbers to keep in mind:
— U.S. warplanes are flying one out of every three …
BattlelandNavy
Turning warships into reefs on the bottom of the ocean – when done so voluntarily – seems a strange fate for a destroyer like the USS Arthur W. Radford. Named in honor of the first Navy officer ever to serve as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, it will be the largest vessel ever sunk in the Atlantic – off the coast of …
BattlelandMilitary
An interesting Reuters ‘special report‘ brings into relief some of the ironies of the current air war over Libya: the French strike craft pummeling Libyan targets over the past month were allegedly on offer to the Gaddafi regime not long ago. At an air show outside Tripoli in 2009, according to photographs taken by Dutch military …
BattlelandPentagon
Kind of sweet that just as Columbia University was announcing this year’s crop of Pulitzer Prize winners, the Pentagon inspector general was saying the Rolling Stone piece that led to the firing of Gen. Stanley McChrystal nearly a year ago didn’t pass muster with Defense Department editors. The IG concluded that there was …
BattlelandWeapons
President Obama called Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu on Monday to mark the start of Passover. Netanyahu said thanks for the call — and the rockets, according to a White House readout of the call.
The United States is sending $205 million to Israel specifically for “Iron Dome,” a high-tech rocket and mortar defense system to help …
BattlelandNational Security
This is a picture of the Soviet-made BM-21 Grad multiple rocket launching system. According to Human Rights Watch, forces loyal to Col. Moammar Gadhafi are using this thing to fire rockets into Misrata, including one recent attack that killed eight people waiting in line for bread.
It’s deadly. It can launch 40 122-millimeter rockets. …
BattlelandTroops
Military retirees know that their family insurance payments under the so-called Tricare program — $460 a year, where they have been since 1995 — are going the way of the gramophone record. Given that hikes are inevitable, their leaders are telling them they should embrace the modest fee increases currently proposed — and then push for …
BattlelandNational Security
Cory Provus, a Milwaukee Brewers baseball team broadcaster (since when did that become a position on the diamond?) recently visited troops recuperating at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in D.C.:
We met one young soldier from Staten Island, NY, that [hey — he’s a broadcaster] lost all 4 limbs while in Afghanistan. But there he was
…
BattlelandNational Security
A House Armed Services subcommittee last week ripped into the new management at Arlington National Cemetery for the continuing burial scandal there. The hearing followed one of my recent articles in TIME that showed how those new managers are sometimes relying on faulty burial paperwork — paperwork that caused the scandal in the first …
