military affairs

The killer swarms that armies can’t defeat

by News Sources 11.28.2012

John Arquilla writes: Today marks the bicentennial of the culminating catastrophe that befell the Grande Armée as it retreated from Russia. This past weekend one of the French Emperor’s descendants, Charles Napoleon, traveled to Minsk in Belarus to attend ceremonies commemorating the disaster at the nearby Beresina River crossing, where thousands died — many by [...]

Read the full article →

The maimed

by News Sources 10.09.2012

Chris Hedges gave this talk Sunday night in New York City at a protest denouncing the 11th anniversary of the war in Afghanistan. The event, at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, was led by Veterans for Peace. Many of us who are here carry within us death. The smell of decayed and bloated corpses. The cries [...]

Read the full article →

Video: War is hell — The Naked and the Dead

by Attention to the Unseen 07.22.2012
Read the full article →

U.S. troops are killing themselves at fastest pace since nation began a decade of war

by News Sources 06.08.2012

The Associated Press reports: Suicides are surging among America’s troops, averaging nearly one a day this year — the fastest pace in the nation’s decade of war. The 154 suicides for active-duty troops in the first 155 days of the year far outdistance the U.S. forces killed in action in Afghanistan — about 50 percent [...]

Read the full article →

Paul Fussell: The culture of war

by Attention to the Unseen 05.31.2012
Read the full article →

Memorial Day: Among post-9/11 veterans, deepening antiwar sentiment

by Paul Woodward 05.26.2012

Here are some numbers to remember this Memorial Day: Although only 1 percent of Americans have served during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, former service members represent 20 percent of suicides in the United States — 18 veterans kill themselves everyday. Close to a million veterans currently have pending disability claims. Christian Science Monitor [...]

Read the full article →

Veterans and brain disease

by News Sources 04.26.2012

Nicholas Kristof writes: He was a 27-year-old former Marine, struggling to adjust to civilian life after two tours in Iraq. Once an A student, he now found himself unable to remember conversations, dates and routine bits of daily life. He became irritable, snapped at his children and withdrew from his family. He and his wife [...]

Read the full article →

Drones, Asia and cyber war

by News Sources 01.09.2012
Read the full article →

The future of the U.S. military

by News Sources 01.06.2012
Read the full article →

Turning war into ‘peace’ by deleting and replacing memories

by News Sources 01.03.2012

Imagine soldiers who couldn’t be traumatized; who could engage in the worst imaginable brutality and not only remember nothing, but remember something else, completely benign. That might just sound like dystopian science fiction, but ongoing research is laying the foundations to turn this into reality. Alison Winter, author of Memory: Fragments of a Modern History, [...]

Read the full article →

How they learned to hate the bomb

by News Sources 01.01.2012

A New York Times review of The Partnership: Five Cold Warriors and Their Quest to Ban the Bomb: On the day after a nuclear bomb annihilates Washington, New Delhi, Islamabad, Seoul, Tel Aviv or Moscow, vaporizing and burning to death hundreds of thousands of people, our present complacency about nuclear proliferation will look like daylight [...]

Read the full article →

How many U.S. soldiers were wounded in Iraq? Guess again

by News Sources 12.31.2011

Dan Froomkin writes: Reports about the end of the war in Iraq routinely describe the toll on the U.S. military the way the Pentagon does [PDF]: 4,487 dead, and 32,226 wounded. The death count is accurate. But the wounded figure wildly understates the number of American servicemembers who have come back from Iraq less than [...]

Read the full article →

A look at the US military’s Joint Special Operations Command

by News Sources 09.03.2011

Dana Priest and William M. Arkin write: Two presidents and three secretaries of defense routinely have asked JSOC to mount intelligence-gathering missions and lethal raids, mostly in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also in countries with which the United States was not at war, including Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, the Philippines, Nigeria and Syria. “The CIA doesn’t [...]

Read the full article →

Army vet with PTSD sought the treatment he needed by taking hostages — but got jail instead

by News Sources 08.28.2011

Stars and Stripes reports: “I’m Robert Anthony Quinones, but my friends call me Q,” the former Army sergeant told the ER medic as he pointed a 9 mm handgun at the medic’s head. “Can I call you Q?” asked the nervous medic, Sgt. Hubert Henson. “Yeah.” “OK,” Henson replied. “Well, Q, if you put the [...]

Read the full article →

Hold Israel accountable with Leahy law

by News Sources 08.19.2011

Josh Ruebner writes: Apologists for Israeli occupation and apartheid claim that advocates for holding Israel accountable for its human rights abuses of Palestinians are “singling Israel out for extra scrutiny” or “holding Israel to a higher standard than other countries.” Yet, ironically, Israel’s supporters also claim that U.S. military aid to Israel is sacrosanct and, [...]

Read the full article →

Suicide: For some South Florida veterans, it’s the biggest threat

by News Sources 07.09.2011

The Los Angeles Times reports: During 27 years in the Army, Ben Mericle survived tours in Bosnia, the Gulf War and Iraq. But it was only after coming home to West Palm Beach in 2006 that he came close to dying — by his own hand. “I just wanted to disappear,” said Mericle, 50, recalling [...]

Read the full article →

How Boeing ripped off American taxpayers

by News Sources 06.28.2011

The Project on Government Oversight reports: $644.75 for a small gear smaller than a dime that sells for $12.51: more than a 5,100 percent increase in price. $1,678.61 for another tiny part, also smaller than a dime, that could have been bought within DoD for $7.71: a 21,000 percent increase. $71.01 for a straight, thin [...]

Read the full article →

Cyber combat: act of war

by News Sources 05.31.2011

The Wall Street Journal reports: The Pentagon has concluded that computer sabotage coming from another country can constitute an act of war, a finding that for the first time opens the door for the U.S. to respond using traditional military force. The Pentagon’s first formal cyber strategy, unclassified portions of which are expected to become [...]

Read the full article →

How America screws its soldiers

by News Sources 05.29.2011

Andrew J. Bacevich writes: Riders on Boston subways and trolleys are accustomed to seeing placards that advertise research being conducted at the city’s many teaching hospitals. One that recently caught my eye, announcing an experimental “behavioral treatment,” posed this question to potential subjects: “Are you in the U.S. military or a veteran disturbed by terrible [...]

Read the full article →

‘Wounded warriors’: sexual assault in the US military

by News Sources 05.25.2011

At Open Democracy, Jenny Morgan writes: First dinner of the Nobel Women’s Initiative conference on ending sexual violence in conflict, and I had the good fortune to sit in on a wide-ranging conversation that started when Anu Bhagwati, the former US Marine Corps company commander who runs a campaigning organisation called the Service Women’s Action [...]

Read the full article →

US-Israeli interdependence?

by Paul Woodward 02.15.2011

Associated Press reports: The top U.S. military officer says the relationship between the American and Israeli militaries is especially relevant while Mideast nations are steeped in unrest. Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, discussed the instability in Egypt with Israeli President Shimon Peres on Monday. He said the American-Israeli alliance [...]

Read the full article →

Lockheed Martin: the shadow government

by News Sources 01.08.2011

Yahoo Tech Ticker reports: Too big to fail? That’s been the key question asked of Wall Street’s biggest banks since the September 2008 collapse of Lehman Brothers, which sent shock waves through the global financial system and led to the worst recession this country has seen since the Great Depression. But, there is another firm [...]

Read the full article →

The tyranny of the national security state

by News Sources 01.06.2011

Andrew Bacevich writes: American politics is typically a grimy business of horses traded and pork delivered. Political speech, for its part, tends to be formulaic and eminently forgettable. Yet on occasion, a politician will transcend circumstance and bear witness to some lasting truth: George Washington in his Farewell Address, for example, or Abraham Lincoln in [...]

Read the full article →

World tired of paying bill for US military

by News Sources 12.29.2010
Read the full article →

← Previous Entries