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Trash can be deadly. You can get a hint of that from the contract solicitation issued Tuesday by the Defense Logistics Agency’s European disposition office seeking “hazardous waste services in southwest Asia.” Lord knows, after a decade of war the U.S. military needs help getting rid of these deadly leftovers. The Pentagon made clear that [...]
…this week in Time magazine, Battleland’s own Nate Rawlings joins forces with Time AfPak correspondent Aryn Baker to write the compelling story on Bowe Bergdahl, the U.S. Army sergeant who has been held by insurgents along the AfPak frontier for nearly three years. In this video, Nate talks about the Bergdahl case, and why he [...]
Marine General John Allen, commander of forces in Afghanistan, is planning for the end – the withdrawal of U.S. forces, expecting to leave behind a small training force, but saddling the U.S. taxpayers with at least $2 billion a year to pay for the Afghan security force. Better deal than we have now, at roughly [...]
Nearly three years ago, Private First Class Bowe Bergdahl, a machine gunner with the 4th Brigade (Airborne), 25th Infantry Division, disappeared from his outpost in eastern Afghanistan. A short time later, the military learned that Bowe had been captured by the Taliban. For every parent who sends their son or daughter to war, the ultimate [...]
It’s been nearly two months since the Kandahar massacre – some time and distance, but not much. Some things are clearer, some things still aren’t. We don’t know why Staff Sergeant Robert Bales did what he did. We do know the American public’s confidence in the war effort plunged post-Kandahar. We don’t know if that [...]
The over-deployment of a too-small military since 9/11 has led to a peculiar situation where Congress and the nation feel a subtle sense of guilt over what they have put the nation’s young men and women in uniform through. It has warped military compensation and retirement policies, Lawrence J. Korb, Alex Rothman, and Max Hoffman [...]
The latest batch of Osama bin Laden documents shows what you’d expect from a one-time terror mastermind whose best years were behind him. He’d spent six years confined to a house with several of his wives, and where the only way he could get outside was to walk inside the walled compound, or atop the [...]
It’s sad that what should be a day of quiet satisfaction – the anniversary of the death of Osama bin Laden, the killer of nearly 3,000 innocents – has degenerated into a political spitball fight. Battleland well remembers Jimmy Carter’s failed mission to rescue the U.S. hostages held by Iran’s government in Tehran 30 years [...]
We’re all familiar with Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and her five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and, finally, acceptance. Well, over at Best Defense, Tom Ricks has come up with a similar construct detailing the six stages U.S. military commanders go through in their dealings with their local counterparts in Afghanistan and Iraq:
I just read about another reprehensible incident that has come to light after two years. Photos of soldiers from the 82nd Airborne, based at Fort Bragg, N.C., posing with body parts of dead suicide bombers in Afghanistan, were recently published by the Los Angeles Times. The troops were stationed in Afghanistan in 2010. Americans have [...]
