BattlelandNational Security
Stan McChrystal, the four-star Army general booted from command of the Afghan war in June after derisive comments from him and his staff got him fired by President Obama, launches his second classroom session — “The Changing Military” — as a Yale University lecturer Tuesday. If it’s anything like last week’s — “The Importance of …
BattlelandNational Security
On Thursday, the White House announced the seventh Medal of Honor to be awarded to troops killed in either Afghanistan or Iraq. No living soldier, sailor, airman or Marine had earned the medal since Vietnam, something that has raised question about the military’s MOH-vetting process among veterans, the military and Congress. But the same …
BattlelandNational Security
The Associated Press is kind of the nation’s arbiter of what’s happening. It has the most reporters in the most places, both here and abroad. On Thursday, the AP’s Tom Kent, the deputy managing editor for standards and production, sent out a memo saying the wire service would do its best to play down Terry Jones’ Koran-burning, if it …
BattlelandNational Security
It’s an irony the latest — and one of the biggest blows — to the Pentagon’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy came late Thursday in a case brought by a Republican group. The Log Cabin Republicans describe themselves as “the nation’s only organization of Republicans who support fairness, freedom, and equality for gay and lesbian …
BattlelandNational Security
Another young American soldier has been awarded the Medal of Honor, the White House has just announced. This time it is going to Army Staff Sgt. Robert J. Miller, who earned it for bravery in 2008 for saving the lives of U.S. and Afghan troops during combat.
This is the third of the nation’s highest military decorations to be awarded …
BattlelandNational Security
Tuesday, you may recall, NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen dropped by the Oval Office for a confab with President Obama on progress in Afghanistan, which he detailed for reporters earlier in the day. On Wednesday, the other Afghan shoe dropped as a high-powered band of foreign-policy thinkers began waving red flags warning …
BattlelandNational Security
BattlelandNational Security
NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen slipped in and out of the White House Tuesday like some ancient daguerreotype, his brief visit memorialized only in still photographs — no video, no reporters, no questions, no answers. Perhaps President Obama’s handlers didn’t want another round of bashing like last week’s, when critics — …
BattlelandNational Security
Sometimes you have to go outside the capital to find out what is going on. Take Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ recent proposal to kill the U.S. Joint Forces Command, which could cost the Norfolk, Va., area up to 6,000 jobs while saving taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars annually. A story in today’s Norfolk Virginian-Pilot notes …
BattlelandNational Security
As combat operations in Iraq wind down, it’s important to remember that many of the costs of that war, and the one now raging in Afghanistan, remain to be paid. Toward that end, former Pentagon official Noel Koch offers a sobering stare inside the Army’s Warrior Transition Units in the latest issue of Proceedings magazine, a feisty …
BattlelandNational Security
Captain Dale Goetz became the first Army chaplain to die in combat since Vietnam when a roadside bomb killed him and four fellow soldiers in Afghanistan on Monday. His is a passing worth pondering. Chaplains represent a special category of troop, especially in the lengthy wars the U.S. has been waging in Afghanistan and Iraq. Many Army …
BattlelandNational Security
“The American combat mission in Iraq has ended,” President Obama told the nation Tuesday night, but the 50,000 U.S. troops still on the ground there will continue to pocket combat pay of up to $680 a month. The troops are going to spend most of their time over the next 16 months training Iraqi security forces to fight. But in reality …
BattlelandNational Security
It was almost like the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan — where every male is a suspected terrorist — had been plopped down just outside Washington, D.C. That’s because of what happened to nine senior Pakistani military officers Sunday. They felt mistreated at Washington’s Dulles airport, leading their government to …
