Features

The power & limits of jointness

It has been 20 years since Congress passed the Goldwater-Nichols Act, committing the U.S. armed forces to a vision of “joint warfare” wherein the strands of the separate services were to be …

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Rummy & his generals

An AFJ roundtable on the state of American civil-military relations

In early April, a number of retired U.S. general officers stepped forward to call for the resignation of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. …

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Homeland insecurity

Post-9/11 fixes haven’t fixed a thing

Police and firefighters in major U.S. cities still can’t communicate reliably in a crisis. When airline passengers are screened before being allowed to fly, they aren’t …

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Somalia, Day Two

If you had any doubts that U.S. strategy for the Middle East and the war on terror hadn’t found a coherent theme, yesterday’s "fall of Mogadishu" – an Islamic group, or several …

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Abu Musab al Zarqawi is dead

For once, a tactically insignificant action in Iraq – an airstrike near the town of Hibhib, about 50 miles from Baghdad -will give the United States and its Iraqi allies a strategically …

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Combat fatigue

Vehicle wear and tear in Iraq jeopardizes U.S. Army readiness

In wartime, seemingly small things can have large meanings. So it was with an Army helicopter recently returned to the U.S. from …

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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 …

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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 …

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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 …

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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 …

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