pol-mil

This Certainly Gives Me Confidence

Months after telling a guy to do a job, everyone gets in a room to discuss how he’s going to do it…and immediately begin disagreeing as to what the job is. …a mission statement on a...

Who’s An Abolitionist Today?

The correctness of the statement is damning. It is 150 years to the day since John Brown was hanged, and more Africans are being enslaved today than at the height of the infamous Atlantic slave...

Uh-Oh

If true, this is bad. An Afghan source in Kabul reports that U.S. Ambassador in Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry is holding secret talks with Taliban elements headed by the movement’s foreign...

New Book: Militant Islamist Ideology

CDR Aboul-Enein’s finally done it. I’m going to rave about it sight unseen, based solely on his reputation. Back in the mid-nineties, the Navy tried to build a Foreign Area Officer...

Yemen

So, I’ve been looking into the ops going on at the Yemeni border. Something reminded me of the losing side of the Hama massacre, and I mentioned that to a counterpart. Counterpart tells me he...

Back On Deployment

Multiple AMCROSSes, etc., etc. I don’t recommend Frankfurt terminal B for long layovers. I did give a stranger my hundred year old copy of Butler’s Life of Gordon, though. She was a...

The Irritating Dude Telling The Truth Is Valuable

Michael Yon’s a pugilistic fellow sometimes. He doesn’t mind getting into a scrap, and occasionally I’ve wondered why he got so antagonistic when dealing with something. This...

Escape To The US

Turns out the divorcée asking for help to leave Bahrain was also an Air Force vet.

9/11/09

I re-entered the United States today from a Middle Eastern country. It was faster than I thought I would have been. I transferred in Atlanta–the joke goes that if you die and go to hell on...

Quote Of The Day

Typed from my luxurious, walled, gated compound, where I can’t leave without security measures, a quote from J.D. Johnannes’ latest: The live in the local community, supply themselves off...