A failure of the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction to strike a $1.5 trillion budget cut deal, or a later decision by Congress to reject the plan, could lead to automatic and devastating consequences for the nation’s military and the defense industrial base, a Pentagon spokesman warned.
If either More…
About a week ago, I speculated on Gen. James Mattis’ future in the military, now that Gen. Ray Odierno is set to take over for him at Joint Forces Command. Mattis is a four-star Marine general. He’s leaving a major command. The military is an up-and-out system — you More…
McClatchy’s Nancy Youssef has a big story: as a dividend for leaving Iraq, the Marines will spend twice as much time at home as deployed in a combat zone, reaching the desired two-to-one so-called “dwell to deployment” ratio that the Army won’t see until at least 2012. As the Marines More…
Marine Gen. James T. Conway, the commandant of the Marine Corps, became the first military service chief — or any flag officer, for that matter, so far — to oppose repeal of ‘Don’t Ask Don’t Tell’ during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing yesterday.
“My personal opinion is that
In the final weeks of the 2008 campaign, Lt. Col. (ret.) Bill Russell got a taste of political superstardom. He’d been running against Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.) for a year, inspired by the congressman’s opposition to the Iraq War. In a bad year for Republicans, he’d More…
This sort of reactionary tripe was perhaps inevitable:
A small group of German officers opposed the loyalty oath to Hitler despite great political pressure. They courageously honored and respected the moral and institutional values they represented and knew to be right. We who are Marines are proud to see
With U.S. and Afghan forces about to attempt to take the Afghan village of Marja in Helmand province away from the Taliban, Gen. Stanley McChrystal records this message about how — speaking mostly generically — he wants to show the Afghan people that the Afghan government is about to More…
Not long ago, a Marine colonel named Dale Alford who served in Afghanistan had some blunt criteria for how we’d know if U.S. troops were truly partnered with Afghan soldiers. It came out of some evidently harsh experience. “If you’re not not sleeping with them, eating with them and crapping More…
McClatchy’s Jonathan Landay was with the Marines in Gangjal, a village in southern Afghanistan, when they walked into “a killing zone of relentless gunfire and rocket barrages from Afghan insurgents hidden in the mountainsides.” Read his eyewitness account of the attack that took the lives of four Marines.
Remember many things, but especially the Marines fighting in Afghanistan’s Helmand Province. Here’s a progress report emailed out at 4 p.m. Friday local time/9 a.m. Friday EST from USFOR-A, the U.S. military command in Afghanistan, about Operation Khanjar:
The Marines and Afghan forces are continuing to patrol and have begun
rss