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01 Dec 09

Our Uni-Polar Moment - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

  • Other countries, not merely in western europe, have relied upon US
    protection so heavily that they are now largely incapable of making
    large-scale interventions themselves. They need the Americans. One
    consequence of this is that when the Americans actually ask for help
    there is not much their allies can usefully offer. This strengthens the
    American view that the US is having to shoulder too much of the burden
    itself. There's something to this.
30 Nov 09

The United States is a World Leader in Humanitarian Mine Action

  • having provided more than $1.5 billion since 1993 to mitigate the threat from landmines and explosive remnants of war in nearly 50 countries.
  • U.S. involvement in humanitarian demining began in 1988 in Afghanistan
  • 8 more annotations...

Lost nuclear bomb found - PPRuNe Forums

  • An estimated 50 nuclear warheads, most of them from the former Soviet Union, still lie on the bottom of the world's oceans, according to the environmental group Greenpeace.

Internal emails expose Boeing-Air Force contract discussions - Wikinews, the free news source

RAND | Monographs | Counterinsurgency in Afghanistan: RAND Counterinsurgency Study -- Volume 4

  • By examining the key lessons from all insurgencies since World War II, it finds that most policymakers repeatedly underestimate the importance of indigenous actors to counterinsurgency efforts. The U.S. should focus its resources on helping improve the capacity of the indigenous government and indigenous security forces to wage counterinsurgency.
  • The U.S. military-along with U.S. civilian agencies and other coalition partners-is more likely to be successful in counterinsurgency warfare the more capable and legitimate the indigenous security forces (especially the police), the better the governance capacity of the local state, and the less external support that insurgents receive.
25 Nov 09

The Globe's Policeman - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

  • We are
    not colonists. We have little interest in actually conquering
    territory. But we do have an overabundance of faith in the ability of
    our military to insure our security and our economic interests across
    the globe.
  • Our military foots the bill for the defense of Europe and
    our Asian allies, allowing those countries to spend their own tax
    revenues on lavish safety nets and top-notch education programs.
    Meanwhile, Americans pay for Leviathan. Or at least the Leviathan with
    the guns.
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21 Nov 09

To Learn and to Serve

  • “With the aging of the boomers and those who responded to Kennedy's call to service, we need to replenish the government work force,” says Max Stier, president and CEO of the Partnership for Public Service.


    Stier, a one-man evangelizing squad on behalf of government service, notes that the government must fill 273,000 “mission-critical” positions in the next three years. This will require vast improvements in the way government recruits and a new willingness to invest in its work force.


    The military, he says, gets roughly 40 percent of its officer corps through ROTC. It makes sense to undertake a comparable investment in the civil service.


    In the small and underappreciated world of those who care passionately about improving government's performance and prestige, there are competing visions of how to achieve this. One group of activists and legislators has been pushing to create a Public Service Academy, modeled after the military academies, to prepare a new generation of leaders in government.

  • It's a good idea and would send another powerful signal that government work is and should be valued. But with the extraordinary constraints on the federal budget, the prospects of the large investment that would be required to build a new institution are not exactly rosy. A civilian ROTC would be a good first step. The Roosevelt program has the benefit of drawing on the entire higher education system's capacity to produce specialists.


    The Roosevelt program could also be an antidote to two debilitating trends in our politics. It would push back against the tendency of politicians to deride government (an odd habit, since politicians are themselves engaged in government service). And it might open the way for a bipartisan achievement at a time when such endeavors are in very short supply.

The greed of the generals (II): two questions | The Best Defense

  • Also,
    another friend points out that one of the dangers of this whole
    "mentoring" this is that if you are not careful, you wind up bringing
    in people who simply reinforce existing prejudices, instead of
    challenging them. For example, just how well mentored was Gen. Tommy R.
    Franks in his mishandling of Afghanistan in 2001-02 and then in his
    bungled invasion of Iraq in 2003? (And while we're on the subject of
    money, who remembers that Franks charged a group $100,000 to help them raise money for wounded vets-and that it later turned out that the group only delivered 25 percent of its funds to its supposed beneficiaries?)  WWGMD?
18 Nov 09

Matthew Yglesias » Kristol: Generals Eikenberry and Jones are “Political Hacks”

  • But we continue to urge that he side with the experienced military leaders he’s been fortunate to inherit against the second-guessing of political hacks (and of failed retired generals turned political hacks).


    That’d be retired Generals Karl Eikenberry and James Jones, I assume.

Iran - Salon.com

  • This new Air Force 15-ton bomb may change that calculation.



    JOHN PIKE, GLOBALSECURITY.ORG: We'd certainly be able to take this out with a massive ordnance penetrator, the 30,000-pound boss.

  • The most likely targets? Iran and North Korea
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It looks bad when retired generals make money for mentoring by Tom Ricks | The Best Defense

  • USA Today tells
    the unseemly tale     of retired American generals who go to work for the
    defense industry, but also work as paid "mentors" to the military, which gets
    them helpful inside information -- and all the while collecting generous
    pensions.
17 Nov 09

Grim Statistics | Talking Points Memo

  • The 140 Army suicides so far this year equal the total from all of 2008 -- and almost equal the 142 U.S. troops from all the services killed in Iraq so far this year.
12 Nov 09

Energy and Global Warming News for 11/12/09: Germany to help develop Moroccan solar-thermal energy projects; Clinton calls Copenhagen “steppingstone”; Military’s growing thirst for oil is costing lives — report « Climate Progress

  • Military’s growing thirst for oil is costing lives — report
  • Deloitte LLP’s study found a tenfold increase in the Defense Department’s oil consumption since the start of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. That is a 175 percent increase in oil use per day, per soldier, since the Vietnam War.
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