Yes, the President’s proposed 2013 budget hit the Army hard, as expected, but there were some surprisingly silvery linings for the service: The Army may be in the cross-hairs of the budget cutters, but it’s had a surprisingly good week. While the number of soldiers will drop to 490,000 as long expected, the service is [...]
Today, an article of mine appeared in AOL Defense, a promising new online publication founded just last month but helmed by the eminently savvy Colin Clark, formerly the driving force of the must-read website DoD Buzz. The story is essentially a reported editorial arguing in favor of a struggling Army program called the Ground Combat [...]
My latest post on the National Journal expert blog lashes back against the current backlash against counterinsurgency: Counterinsurgency is here to stay. It’s something the U.S. military will have to keep doing around the world for decades to come, because insurgencies that threaten U.S. interests are going to keep occurring around the world for decades [...]
They had a whole trench network laid out, they had bunker complexes. They were prepared for us…. It was probably only a couple seconds before one of the enemy from on the hilltop was able to get a shot off and shot the other medic in the head…. …we were taking rounds just over my [...]
I posted my thoughts on the impending departure of Defense Secretary Robert Gates, his legacy, and the painful questions left unresolved over at National Journal’s expert blog: We can’t keep doing everything we do now on the current budget, let alone a smaller one, but the current budget is only going to shrink. And Secretary of [...]
Commentary – stop enabling Israel’s self-destruction
A decade studying America’s wars in the Islamic world have given me a different perspective on the Arab-Israeli conflict, one that probably wouldn’t be too popular in Tel Aviv — or many places in this country, either. My latest commentary on the National Journal “expert blog” lays out my strategic argument: Here’s the strategic bottom [...]