AFP/Getty Images

Operation Neptune Spear: The New Textbook for Special Operators

One year removed from the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, hundreds of hours of programing and print pages are being devoted to to telling us what it all means. In this week’s issue of TIME, journalist Peter Bergen and historian Graham Allison walk us through the events that led up to Navy SEALs storming bin [...]

Warrick Page / Getty Images

Last Stand in Abbottabad: The Untold Story of Osama bin Laden’s Hideout

This week’s TIME cover story is an exclusive, detailed feature by Peter Bergen about the final days of Osama bin Laden, who was killed by Navy SEALs in a raid nearly one year ago. In the following excerpt, Bergen, who spent much of his career covering bin Laden and his network of terrorists, provides previously [...]

Squawking SEAL

CNN chum Barbara Starr has the inside skinny on the new book purporting to detail the inside skinny of how the Osama bin Laden raid went down – as told by a former SEAL. Author Chuck Pfarrer claims to have spoken to some Navy SEALs who conducted the raid. It seems his story has more [...]

A Toast…

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta is going to have some fine vino come New Year’s Eve. The $10,000 bottle is a payoff on an offer made by a California restaurateur. It seems Panetta, then CIA director, dined last New Year’s Eve at the tony Sardine Factory owned by pal Ted Balestreri in Panetta’s hometown of Monterey: [...]

Drones + Biometrics: Weapons That Conquer Globalization’s Frontiers

Cool NYT story on the US military’s use of biometrics (eye scans, etc.) to create unforgeable identification records of roughly one-in-five fighting-age Iraqi and Afghani males, creating databases that can be perused in seconds by a handheld device at a border crossing. Naturally, there is much interest and some desire to use the same technology [...]

Why Businesses Lack a SEAL Team 6

Contrary to Stan McChrystal’s SEAL-hiring spree, there aren’t many businesses run like the famed special-forces team that killed Osama bin Laden last month. This piece from the Harvard Business Review explains why. “Most organizations can’t grow the professionalism of elite special forces units because they are constantly shifting strategies and responding to customer-driven demands,” says [...]

Oh No! China Has Our Super-Secret Osama-Getting Helicopter!

That’s bad news. We always knew we couldn’t trust our Pakistani allies to keep valuable technology like the heavily-modified MH-60 Black Hawks, used to ferry Navy SEALs to Osama bin Laden’s Pakistani lair, from the reverse-engineering whizzes of the Middle Kingdom. You may recall reports that the commandos had to abandon one of the quiet [...]

A “Gift of Desperation”: A Marine Reflects on Combat and bin Laden, Who Put Him There

Standing shoulder to shoulder with the rest of the honor graduates from our Officer Candidates School (OCS) class, I accepted my award from the Commanding General with a crisp salute. My transformation from a frat boy trolling Rugby Road at The University of Virginia to a man deemed worthy to lead Marines was finally complete. [...]

The Good bin Laden-Busting SEALs of Approval

OK — admit it. It’s been awhile since the nation had such a sense of accomplishment. But the Navy SEALs — admired not only for their bravery, but for their willingness to do so invisibly — have touched a lot of folks around the country. What lawmaker could ignore the chance to stand in their [...]

Why Wasn’t bin Laden Where We Thought He Was?

If our dealings with Pakistan are hampered by the same flawed assumptions we used in our hunt for Osama bin Laden, the road ahead for Washington and Islamabad is likely to be rocky. Over at Small Wars Journal, Will Chalmers, a research assistant at the Centre for Security, Armed Forces and Society at the Royal [...]