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Next year, the U.S. military will spend an unprecedented $900 billion dollars of the taxpayers’ money but it continues to fail to interest young Americans in military service. “Gen Z is unpatriotic!” and won’t join the military we’re told, but are they really? If so, why? It’s partly poor health and an inability to pass... Read More
Will the Pentagon soon have all the money it desires, but not enough troops to realize its ambitions? After appropriating about $2.26 trillion for the Afghanistan misadventure that put the Taliban back in charge in Kabul, and another $2.21 trillion to destabilize Iraq and deliver it into the hands of Iran, defense hawks in the... Read More
“Patriotism, in the trenches, was too remote a sentiment, and at once rejected as fit only for civilians, or prisoners.” -- Robert Graves, Goodbye To All That(1929). I’m one of the lucky ones. Leaving the madness of Army life with a modest pension and all of my limbs intact feels like a genuine escape. Both... Read More
“Were we right or were we wrong?” This was Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) George Tenet’s central question in his 2004 talk to the faculty and students of his alma mater, Georgetown University. What he was talking about, of course, was the critical political issue of whether or not the Intelligence Community (IC) of which... Read More
Here’s a cheery note for you: the last mass killing of 2017 took place moments before midnight on New Year’s Eve. A 16-year-old New Jersey boy picked up a semi-automatic rifle, “lawfully acquired” by a member of his family, and killed his father, mother, sister, and a family friend. In doing so, he helped ensure... Read More
As Donald Trump might put it, major weapons contractors like Boeing, Raytheon, and Lockheed Martin cashed in “bigly” in his first year in office. They raked in tens of billions of dollars in Pentagon contracts, while posting sharp stock price increases and healthy profits driven by the continuation and expansion of Washington’s post-9/11 wars. But... Read More
I’m sure you’ve heard about the $65 million. Or was it $86 million? Or was it even more? You know, the funds the Pentagon sunk into that hotshot plane it was preparing for its Afghan drug interdiction program. You haven’t? Well, as Megan Rose reported at ProPublica, with its “electro-optical infra-red video capacity,” that counternarcotics... Read More
Secretary of War Ash Carter is concerned about America’s posture. No, it’s not about sitting with your back straight up and your knees placed primly together. It all has to do with how many enemies there are out there threatening the United States and what we have to do, globally speaking, to make them cry... Read More
During the Second World War there was a tongue in cheek song about the benefits of joining the army. It promised “twenty-one dollars a day once a month.” Back when I found myself in basic training at Fort Leonard Wood in 1968 the refrain was largely the same but my recollection is that we were... Read More
Admiral Mike Mullen, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, asserts that the “most significant threat to our national security is our debt.” The money we spend on weaponry — and the fingers that fire them — is staggering. For example, the 2012 Department of Defense budget (more than the annual defense budgets... Read More
“They're rioting in Africa, they're starving in Spain, There're hurricanes in Florida, and Texas needs rain…” That sweetly cynical ballad from the button-downed, short-haired Kingston Trio of the pre-hippy late '50s and early '60s reminds us of just how much our world has changed -- and how much it hasn't. Oh, they're not starving in... Read More