Nick Turse
Nick Turse is the associate editor of TomDispatch.com. His latest book is Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead: War and Survival in South Sudan. He is the author/editor of several other books, including: Tomorrow's Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and Secret Ops in Africa; Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam; The Changing Face of Empire: Special Ops, Drones, Spies, Proxy Fighters, Secret Bases, and Cyber Warfare; Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050 (with Tom Engelhardt); The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives; and The Case for Withdrawal from Afghanistan. Turse is currently a fellow at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute. His website is Nick Turse.com. You can follow him on Twitter @NickTurse, on Tumblr, or Facebook.
Articles by this author
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Views Thursday, June 27, 2019 "What Does War Have to Do With Me?" Sometimes war sounds like the harsh crack of gunfire and sometimes like the whisper of the wind. This early morning -- in al-Yarmouk on the southern edge of Libya’s capital, Tripoli -- it was a mix of both. All around, shops were shuttered and homes emptied, except for those in the hands of the... Read more |
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Views Monday, April 22, 2019 No Need to Whisper, AFRICOM Isn't Listening In If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? Or to bring this thought experiment into the modern age—if it happens in the forest, does it stay in the forest? I ask this question because it has a bearing on the article to come. Specifically, what if an article... Read more |
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Views Tuesday, January 08, 2019 Bases, Bases, Everywhere... Except in the Pentagon’s Report The U.S. military is finally withdrawing (or not ) from its base at al-Tanf. You know, the place that the Syrian government long claimed was a training ground for Islamic State (ISIS) fighters; the land corridor just inside Syria, near both the Iraqi and Jordanian borders , that Russia has called a... Read more |
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Views Tuesday, September 04, 2018 The US Military is Winning. No, Really, It Is! 4,000,000,029,057. Remember that number. It’s going to come up again later. But let’s begin with another number entirely: 145,000 -- as in, 145,000 uniformed soldiers striding down Washington’s Pennsylvania Avenue . That’s the number of troops who marched down that very street in May 1865 after the... Read more |
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Views Monday, August 06, 2018 The Legacy of Infinite War Raids by U.S. commandos in Afghanistan. (I could be talking about 2001 or 2018 .) A U.S. drone strike in Yemen. (I could be talking about 2002 or 2018 .) Missions by Green Berets in Iraq. (I could be talking about 2003 or 2018 .) While so much about the War on Terror turned Global War on Terrorism... Read more |
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Views Tuesday, July 17, 2018 The Global Growth of U.S. Special Operations Forces Early last month, at a tiny military post near the tumbledown town of Jamaame in Somalia, small arms fire began to ring out as mortar shells crashed down. When the attack was over, one Somali soldier had been wounded -- and had that been the extent of the casualties, you undoubtedly would never... Read more |
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Views Tuesday, May 29, 2018 Tomorrow's Terror Today: Pentagon Documents Detail Dystopian Dangers For almost 20 years, U.S. drone warfare was largely one-sided. Unlike Afghans and Yemenis, Iraqis and Somalis, Americans never had to worry about lethal robots hovering overhead and raining down missiles. Until, that is, one appeared in the skies above Florida. But that’s a story for later. For now... Read more |
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Views Thursday, February 08, 2018 Drug Wars, Missing Money, and a Phantom $500 Million 2017 was a year of investigations for U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM). There was the investigation of the two-star commander of U.S. Army Africa who allegedly sent racy texts to an enlisted man’s wife. There was the investigation into the alleged killing of a Special Forces soldier by Navy SEALs in... Read more |
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Views Tuesday, January 09, 2018 The Coming Year in U.S. Special Operations Failures At around 11 o’clock that night, four Lockheed MC-130 Combat Talons, turboprop Special Operations aircraft, were flying through a moonless sky from Pakistani into Afghan airspace. On board were 199 Army Rangers with orders to seize an airstrip. One hundred miles to the northeast, Chinook and Black... Read more |
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Views Thursday, December 14, 2017 A Wider World of War: Under Donald Trump, U.S. Special Forces Deployed to 149 Countries in 2017 “We don’t know exactly where we’re at in the world, militarily, and what we’re doing,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, in October. That was in the wake of the combat deaths of four members of the Special Operations forces in the West African nation of... Read more |