As the single largest consumer of energy in the world, the U.S. military is poised at the center of two of the most life-altering issues of our time: climate change and the height of oil production (“peak oil”). Surprisingly, the Pentagon began taking both matters seriously much sooner than the rest of government, which still has its fair share of skeptics.
Tuesday evening offered an unusual opportunity
to question the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (2001-2005),
Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, at an alumni club dinner. He was
eager to talk about his just-published memoir, Eyes on the Horizon
(and I was able to scan through a copy during the cocktail hour).
SAN FRANCISCO - A three-year battle over whether Junior Reserve Officers' Training Corps belongs in San Francisco schools ended Tuesday night with a 4-3 vote by the school board to restore the military leadership program weeks before its scheduled expiration.
More than 200 supporters and opponents of the program crowded into the school district headquarters to make their final pleas to the board. And their arguments were as emotionally charged as they were when the fight began in 2006.
Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates announced yesterday that he had requested the resignation of the top American general in Afghanistan, Gen. David D. McKiernan, making a rare decision to remove a wartime commander at a time when the Obama administration has voiced increasing alarm about the country's downward spiral.
Last Thursday, in what was billed as his very first on-the-record address, Lt. Gen. Keith Dayton, U.S. security coordinator for Israel and the Palestinian Authority, spoke to the 2009 Soref Symposium organized by the
Washington Institute for Near East Policy. WINEP, of course, is the chief thinktank for the Washington-based Israel lobby.
And in his talk, Gen. Dayton delivered an important warning.
The continuing saga of the Pentagon pundit program just keeps getting curiouser and curiouser, as Alice in Wonderland might say.
AUSTRALIA needs to massively bolster its military capacity to deal with the rise of China and the possible decline of American influence in the region, according to a Defence white paper to be released today.
The paper also redraws the policies of the Howard era, making it clear that Australia would not necessarily follow its main ally into expeditionary conflicts such as the Iraq war unless there was a threat to our "wider strategic interests".
MARFA, Texas - Sexual assault of women serving in the U.S. military, while brought to light in recent reports, has a long tradition in that institution.
Women in America were first allowed into the military during the Revolutionary War in 1775, and their travails are as old.
Maricela Guzman served in the Navy from 1998 to 2002 as a computer technician on the island of Diego Garcia, and later in Naples, Italy. She was raped while in boot camp, but was too scared to talk about the assault for the rest of her time in the military.
With little public scrutiny, robotics is quickly
revolutionizing not only how war is fought, but who fights in war.
While the U.S. military first began to experiment with
remote-controlled weapons during World War I, the Pentagon had no
robots on the ground when it invaded Iraq in 2003, and only a handful
of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in the air. Today, according to P.W.
Singer, author of Wired for War and a senior fellow at the
Brookings Institution, the U.S.
There are few statistics as stunning
as the following simple, single number: The United States spends
two times more on its military than all the other countries of the world,
combined.
Yes, that's right. All 200 or
so of them. Combined.
