Afghan commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal is in Germany at the moment where he might need to help the government there with a bit of messaging on Afghanistan. German troops have been buying up badges saying “I Fight For Merkel,” an ironic jab at German Chancellor Angela Merkel who they say has failed to explain why […]
From the monthly archives:
April 2010
At 7:52 p.m. last night, an Air Force Atlas 501 rocket shot the capsule enclosed X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle into space from Cape Canaveral. Resembling a small space shuttle, the OTV was built in Boeing’s famed Phantom Works. The OTV will serve as an “on-orbit” laboratory for new sensors and other high-tech devices that will […]
Iran began large scale military exercises today in the Gulf, including the Strait of Hormuz, according to Iranian television. Tehran routinely threatens to halt all traffic in the Gulf if attacked. Could they do it? Only temporarily, Joint Chiefs vice chair Marine Gen. James Cartwright told the Senate Armed Services Committee last week. He pointed […]
That Defense Secretary Robert Gates is thoroughly shaking up a military bureaucracy desperately in need of a good shaking is a given. When I talk to Pentagon policy folks another name comes up again-and-again as somebody who has also done much to drag the military into a new era: Mike Vickers, assistant defense secretary for […]
Writer and journalist Sebastian Junger, who spent much of 2007 and 2008 embedded with Battle Company of the 173rd Airborne in the Korengal, pens a farewell to the embattled six mile long valley in eastern Afghanistan. He worries about the emotional repercussions of the pullout on the many soldiers who fought there and saw their […]
