Archive for August, 2006

Bridging the chasm between military and civilian worlds

Nathaniel Fick’s account of his time as a Marine Corps officer stands as a monument to this generation of warriors. Using vivid prose to …

The new struggle for Africa

frica has suffered many curses, from massive corruption to AIDS to dysfunctional borders drawn by cynical Europeans. Oppression, illiteracy, deadly ethnic and religious rivalries — Africa’s litany …

Looking stabilization square in the face

Old vaudevillians say dying is easy but comedy is hard. For American armed forces, conventional warfare is relatively easy, but stabilization and reconstruction operations are hard. …

The Pentagon’s fixation on long-range strikes is shortsighted

If the experience of the past five years means anything, it is that the Long War for the greater Middle East is most likely …

The struggle for Iraq is, even as the fighting continues, a struggle to shape history; how Iraq is understood and remembered may be as strategically important as any other facet of the …

Fuller, who helps manage the Army’s Stryker vehicle program, was so fed up with the unplanned consumption of time and resources that he coined his own word for the situation — creating, …

“Fighting an irregular war is an extremely difficult conversion for any regular army, even a superpower.”

— Maj. Gen. William G. Webster, commander, Task Force Baghdad, November 2005

General Webster could have …

For its decision in the Hamdan v. Rumsfeld case. As correct as the court was to limit executive “emergency” powers as a matter of U.S. law, its introduction of Article 3 of …

This month’s issue of AFJ concentrates on the “war in words”; that is, how Operation Iraqi Freedom has begun to be recorded by history, or at least history as it appears to …

Elections stir up decades-old oil dependence debate

For several years, Rep. Roscoe Bartlett, R-Md., has warned that world oil production would soon peak, demand will continue to rise and the world will …