Archive for June, 2006

The force we have

Jointness hobbles the services in a decentralized fight

“As you know, you have to go to war with the Army you have, not the Army you want.”

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has …

Read more ›

Lessons unlearned

The history of air power in unconventional warfare

Any publication with insurgents and terrorists in its title is certain to attract a certain amount of attention these days, but a 2003 book …

Read more ›

View from the FOB

The perks and pitfalls of forward operating bases

The conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan have introduced a large, new vocabulary of acronyms and abbreviations into the American experience of war: GWOT, GSAVE, …

Read more ›

Casey’s Drawdown Plan

Over the weekend, the New York Times reported that Gen. George Casey, the senior U.S. commander in Iraq, has prepared a plan to reduce U.S. combat forces in Iraq from the current …

Read more ›

The Strategic Center in Iraq

U.S. strategists have long been torn about which of the factions in Iraq represents our most natural ally. We have given protection to the Kurds since the end of Operation Desert Storm, …

Read more ›

To Kristian Gustafson

A “senior lecturer” at the Department of War Studies, Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, England, for getting his Franks crossed. In a piece titled “General Botched Both Gulf Wars” in the National Post …

Read more ›

A Turning Point?

Reporting back in the Rose Garden after his zip-trip to Baghdad, after "looking" Iraqi leader Nouri al Maliki "in the eye," President Bush yesterday said that many Iraqi feared "America will lose …

Read more ›

Janus and the god of jointness

This year marks the 20th anniversary of the U.S. military’s airstrike against five terrorist training camps in Libya, a retaliation for the bombing of a Berlin discotheque in which three U.S. servicemen …

Read more ›

Back to Mogadishu?

"Somalia is the failed state." That was the assessment of Marine Maj. Gen. Timothy Ghormley, the commander of U.S. forces in the Horn of Africa, last December. The apparent triumph yesterday of …

Read more ›

Hidden history

A thrilling account of the Afghanistan air war

Why has the U.S. Air Force gotten so bad at studying its own history? In the wake of Operation Desert Storm in 1991, the …

Read more ›