William Astore
William J. Astore is a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF), who has taught at the Air Force Academy and the Naval Postgraduate School, and now teaches History at the Pennsylvania College of Technology. He welcomes reader comments at wjastore@gmail.com.
Articles by this author
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Views Thursday, March 15, 2018 The Fog of America's Phony War Overseas, the United States is engaged in real wars in which bombs are dropped, missiles are launched, and people (generally not Americans) are killed, wounded, uprooted, and displaced . Yet here at home, there’s nothing real about those wars. Here, it’s phony war all the way. In the last 17 years... Read more |
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Views Monday, February 05, 2018 Our Enemy, Ourselves Whether the rationale is the need to wage a war on terror involving 76 countries or renewed preparations for a struggle against peer competitors Russia and China (as Defense Secretary James Mattis suggested recently while introducing America’s new National Defense Strategy ), the U.S. military is... Read more |
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Views Tuesday, September 12, 2017 The American Military: Out Everywhere and Winning Nowhere When it comes to the “ world’s greatest military ,” the news has been shocking. Two fast U.S. Navy ships colliding with slow-moving commercial vessels with tragic loss of life. An Air Force that has been in the air continuously for years and yet doesn’t have enough pilots to fly its combat jets... Read more |
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Views Friday, July 14, 2017 Preparing for Doomsday: A Shelter-in-Place Mentality Is the New American Normal Has there ever been a nation as dedicated to preparing for doomsday as the United States? If that’s a thought that hasn’t crossed your mind, maybe it’s because you didn’t spend part of your life inside Cheyenne Mountain. That's a tale I’ll get to soon, but first let me mention America’s “ doomsday... Read more |
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Views Tuesday, June 06, 2017 America’s Real Red Scare: The Slow-Motion Collapse of the American Empire Jump into your time machine and let me transport you back to another age. It’s May 2001 and the Atlantic Monthly has just arrived in the mail. I’m tantalized by the cover article. “Russia is finished,” the magazine announces. The subtitle minces no words: “The unstoppable descent into social... Read more |
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Views Thursday, April 13, 2017 What Does an "America-First" Foreign Policy Actually Mean? What does an “America-first” foreign policy look like under President Donald Trump? As a start, forget the ancient label of “isolationism.” With the end of Trump’s first 100 days approaching, it looks more like a military-first policy aimed at achieving global hegemony, which means it’s a potential... Read more |
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Views Tuesday, February 28, 2017 In Afghanistan, America's Biggest Foe Is Self-Deception America’s war in Afghanistan is now in its 16th year, the longest foreign war in our history. The phrase “no end in sight” barely covers the situation. Prospects of victory -- if victory is defined as eliminating that country as a haven for Islamist terrorists while creating a representative... Read more |
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Views Thursday, January 26, 2017 A Violent Cesspool of Our Own Making: The Dark [K]night of Donald Trump I came of age during America's Cold War with the Soviet Union, witnessing its denouement while serving in the U.S. military. In those days, the USSR led the world's weapons trade, providing arms to the Warsaw Pact (the military alliance it dominated) as well as to client states like Cuba, Egypt,... Read more |
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Views Tuesday, December 20, 2016 All the President's Generals America has always had a love affair with its generals. It started at the founding of the republic with George Washington and continued with (among others) Andrew Jackson, Zachary Taylor , Ulysses S. Grant, and Dwight D. Eisenhower. These military men shared something in common: they were winning... Read more |
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Views Friday, August 12, 2016 Our Greatest National Security Threat? Perpetual War The United States is now engaged in perpetual war with victory nowhere in sight. Iraq is chaotic and scarred . So, too, is Libya . Syria barely exists. After 15 years, “progress” in Afghanistan has proven eminently reversible as efforts to rollback recent Taliban gains continue to falter. The... Read more |