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, April 08, 2021 Back to the Future—and the Cold War—at the Pentagon The future isn’t what it used to be. As a teenager in the 1970s, I watched a lot of TV science fiction shows, notably Space: 1999 and UFO , that imagined a near future of major moon bases and alien attacks on Earth. Movies of that era like Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey envisioned colossal... Read more |
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Views Thursday, March 04, 2021 Rewarding Failure: Why Pentagon Weapons Programs Rarely Get Canceled Despite Major Problems Cancel culture is a common, almost viral, term in political and social discourse these days. Basically, somebody expresses views considered to be outrageous or vile or racist or otherwise insensitive and inappropriate. In response, that person is "canceled," perhaps losing a job or otherwise... Read more |
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Views Tuesday, February 02, 2021 A Ten-Point Plan to Make Joe Biden a Peace-Time President When it comes to war, if personnel is policy, America is yet again in deep trouble. As retired Army Major Danny Sjursen recently pointed out at TomDispatch , when it comes to foreign policy, President Joe Biden’s new cabinet and advisers are well stocked with retired generals , reconstituted... Read more |
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Views Tuesday, January 12, 2021 We're All Prisoners of War Now "POWs Never Have A Nice Day." That sentiment was captured on a button a friend of mine wore for our fourth grade class photo in 1972. That prisoners of war could never have such a day was reinforced by the sad face on that button. Soon after, American POWs would indeed be released by their North... Read more |
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Views Tuesday, December 08, 2020 Spilling Ink and Spilling Blood: Fighting and Writing Against America’s Forever Wars If you have a moment, how about joining two retired officers, Bill Astore and me, Danny Sjursen, as we think about this country’s catastrophic forever wars that, regardless of their deadly costs and lack of progress, never seem quite to end ? Recently, in a podcast chat about our very different but... Read more |
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Views Monday, November 09, 2020 Reclaiming American Idealism As I lived through the nightmare of the election campaign just past, I often found myself dreaming of another American world entirely. Anything but this one. In that spirit, I also found myself looking at a photo of my fourth-grade class, vintage 1972. Tacked to the wall behind our heads was a... Read more |
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Views Thursday, October 01, 2020 America's Dark Side in the Age of Trump What pops into your head when you hear the number 1,000 in a political-military context? Having studied German military history, I immediately think of Adolf Hitler’s confident boast that his Third Reich would last a thousand years. In reality, of course, a devastating world war brought that Reich... Read more |
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Views Monday, July 27, 2020 Killing Democracy in America The phrase "thinking about the unthinkable" has always been associated with the unthinkable cataclysm of a nuclear war, and rightly so. Lately, though, I’ve been pondering another kind of unthinkable scenario, nearly as nightmarish (at least for a democracy) as a thermonuclear Armageddon, but one... Read more |
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Views Monday, June 08, 2020 'Light Em Up': Warrior Cops When the Wars Come Home From their front porches, regular citizens watched a cordon of cops sweep down their peaceful street in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Rankled at being filmed, the cops exceeded their authority and demanded that people go inside their houses. When some of them didn’t obey quickly enough, the order—one... Read more |
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Views Tuesday, March 31, 2020 What My Father Taught Me About Living Through Coronavirus Hard Times My dad was born in 1917. Somehow, he survived the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918-1919, but an outbreak of whooping cough in 1923 claimed his baby sister, Clementina. One of my dad’s first memories was seeing his sister’s tiny white casket. Another sister was permanently marked by scarlet fever. In... Read more |