Blog Posts

Author expands on Propaganda of the Deed.

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Lesson of Afghanistan Crash Is Not to Rush for Exit by Mark Moyar, Bloomberg. BLUF:

“The destruction of a single helicopter tells us nothing about who is winning the war. The larger history of the Tangi Valley, on the other hand, provides valuable insights into the challenges we now face in Afghanistan. Far from demonstrating the advisability of rapid retrenchment, it shows that withdrawing troops from counterinsurgency missions means forfeiting earlier gains…”

There is a popular narrative regarding Somalia that no successful humanitarian operation can be conducted there. Like all narratives, this one exists to tell a complex story in simple terms; as with most narratives, the Somali version holds a mixture of fact combined with myth. 

Over the next four weeks the US Army COIN Center will feature guests discussing key aspects of FM 3-24.

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My latest, Men at War: Come Home with Your Shield, or On It.

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Continue on for what was supposed to be this morning's SWJ news and opinion roundup. Bonus though, the entry has been updated with today's events... We aim to please;-)

Immediate issues in our far-from-elegant platform transition. And we thought the whole OIF Phase 4 thing was a mess.  Jeez!

Defense Spending in Washington Spotlight by Carolyn Lochhead, San Francisco Chronicle. BLUF: “Two Californians will be central to the outcome (US defense budget future). One is House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, a liberal San Francisco Democrat who helped engineer a provision in the debt deal that exposes the Pentagon to nearly $1 trillion in cuts over the next decade. The other is Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, a former Democratic congressman from Monterey who warned in his maiden press conference Thursday that such cuts are ‘completely unacceptable.’”

The pictures of starving Somalis are back. Not since the horrific famine and infamous Black Hawk down incident of the early 1990s has a Horn of Africa country dominated so much attention.

Direct Observations of a Contractor in Iraq.

Continue on for the latest news update / roundup on the CH-47 shootdown in Afghanistan.

Colorful Maps: The Military's Costly Weapon in the War in Afghanistan by Joshua Foust, The Atlantic. BLUF: “USAID has more fundamental problems than a lack of geospatial analysis that is mostly done by the intelligence community already. Rather than creating its own duplicate GIS system, USAID could instead try liaising with these agencies (many of which, like the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, have scads of unclassified GIS data to use) to see what's available before they go dropping cash they really can't afford…”

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Half of NATO’s Trainers Could Stay in Afghanistan Past 2014 by William Marsden, National Post. BLUF: “NATO trainers will continue to mentor and train Afghan army and police for years past the pullout deadline of 2014, said Col. Peter Dawe, deputy commander of the Canadian contribution to the NATO training mission… as many as half of NATO’s total training contingent will remain after 2014 to continue their job of helping Afghans build a professional security force that by 2012 will number 352,000 strong, including 157,000 police.”

My column this week at Foreign Policy explains how the U.S. debt crisis will change strategic assumptions and security strategies not only in Washington but across the world. I also explain why demographic trends have little bearing on military power.

Bing West, author of The Village, The Strongest Tribe, and The Wrong War, wrote this paper while working at RAND.  This 1969 paper summarizes West’s three years

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US Joint Forces Command, established in 1999 to champion getting all branches of the military to work together more closely, cased its colors today at a ceremony in Suffolk, VA.

A brief orientation to what has changed, and what else is to come.