BattlelandNational Security
Did you realize what just happened? President Barack Obama sketched out his own doctrine on the use of U.S. military force, eclipsing the one crafted by Army Gen. Colin Powell nearly a generation ago. Obama spoke Monday night at the National Defense University and detailed, in a fairly nuanced way, how and why the U.S. is wielding its …
BattlelandNational Security
Here you can see a breakdown of just the sorties that are devoted to air-to-ground missions, the protect-the-people missions. Again, the numbers at right are totals for the entire operation. From Friday to Sunday, there was an increase in strikes from 91 to 107, but the majority each day were flown by our partner-nation pilots. I know
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BattlelandNational Security
In the 1980s, when the Reagan Administration’s defense buildup was in full swing, various military lobbying outfits would rent out the big halls in hotels around the capital to show off the latest weaponry they were trying to sell to the government. That’s so 20th Century. This week, the action moves to downtown D.C. and the huge new …
BattlelandNational Security
Josh Rogin over at Foreign Policy has put together a list of the countries participating in the various coalitions with the U.S. over the past generation in assorted military campaigns. Despite President Obama’s call for multilateral action, Rogin notes, Obama’s Libyan enterprise has the smallest coalition of the lot — 15 nations as of …
BattlelandNational Security
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yAyCdfOXvec&feature=player_embedded#at=14]
A Monday morning video-for-thought, as President Obama prepares to address the nation from the National Defense University tonight at 7:30 p.m. EDT.
BattlelandNational Security
It was whiplash Sunday as Defense Secretary Robert Gates was followed on ABC’s This Week broadcast by former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld. The contrast between the mild-mannered Gates, with his soft Kansas twang, and Rumsfeld’s Chicago staccato couldn’t be clearer. Rumsfeld, once again, seemed to prefer certitude (a measure of a …
BattlelandNational Security
President Obama and his commanders have made it clear there will be “no American boots on the ground” in Libya. So how come 2,200 heavily-armed and ready-to-fight Marines are heading to just off “the shores of Tripoli,” as leathernecks like to sing? They’re the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU), and will be climbing aboard the …
BattlelandNational Security
Stephen Walt — now of Harvard and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and formerly of Princeton, the University of Chicago and the Pentagon’s Institute of Defense Analyses — obviously has a blue-ribbon foreign-policy pedigree. That’s what makes his argument this week that George W. Bush and Barack Obama are fundamentally …
BattlelandNational Security
If you needed any more evidence that the U.S. and its allies began writing the book on attacking Libya without knowing how the final chapter would read, the evidence is now in.
BattlelandNational Security
More than 60 years after rescuing Europe from Adolf Hitler — and incurring more than 100,000 casualties in the valiant effort — U.S. commanders have ordered American troops based in Europe not to wear their uniforms off post. It’s to keep them from becoming terrorist targets. It comes three weeks after a German-born Muslim militant …
BattlelandNational Security
A woman alleged rape in federal court in Virginia earlier this week. Her complaint blames the Pentagon for turning a terrible event into a nightmare that continues today, nearly five years after the claimed assault. In its dry, legal prose, the document alleges just how poorly the U.S. military often handles these kinds of cases.
BattlelandNational Security
Iraq was at its most violent in 2006 and 2007, just as the U.S. “surge” of 30,000 additional troops into the country was getting underway. A West Point analysis of the foreign fighters involved in the increasing carnage showed that the nation sending the most militants to Iraq from August 2006 to August 2007, was, on a per-capita basis, Libya.
BattlelandNational Security
MARCH 30 UPDATE: Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., at Tuesday’s armed services committee hearing about the U.S. handing off the Libyan war to NATO:
When the U.S. turns responsibility over to NATO, it’s not like we’re taking a hot potato and throwing it to somebody else. We’re NATO.
