Marine Leadership is Pissed Off

Some Marines in Afghanistan pissed on a dead Taliban.  And the Marines’ leadership is pissed off about it.  As they say, it’s better to be pissed off than pissed on. These kinds of things are clearly not good, but they are also somewhat predictable.  Let’s not get carried away in our condemnations.  Americans, like our [...]

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Iraq Pullout

America really gave it the college try in Iraq, but in no sense of the word can it be said we “won.”  It was more like a draw or a mixed bag. We won everything worth winning back in 2004:  Saddam was gone, no WMDs were found, and we had lost a minimum of lives. [...]

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Ten Years After September 11, 2001

Ten years ago today, our country and my family received a terrible blow.  We were attacked.  Our countrymen were murdered.  We were shaken. 9/11 is an important historical event that has defined much of the last ten years, but it was also a family tragedy for me, as my Uncle Donnie Regan gave his life [...]

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Dancing With the Devil

Another sad and typical story from Afghanistan: A Marine lieutenant colonel and sergeant have died in Afghanistan in what appears to be a shooting by an Afghan policeman.  . . . “While this is a serious incident, the actions of this individual do not reflect the overall actions of our Afghan partners,” said Marine Maj. [...]

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Reality Check on Military Tribunals

Military tribunals make perfect sense for members of al Qaeda.  These individuals are non-citizens, their prosecution often depends on sensitive intelligence, and their presence in American courtrooms would be disruptive and a security risk.  In war, military tribunals have been used from the Revolutionary War forward, and their streamlined procedures, ability to hold proceedings in [...]

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Afghanistan: What is Progress?

I’m really amazed, frankly, that for ten years the commanders of US efforts have said that “we’re making progress” as things seem, more or less, not to have changed much after the bulk of al Qaeda fled into Pakistan’s western tribal regions in early 2002. Retired Marine Bing West’s new book looks very interesting.  He [...]

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On The Lack of Realism

The complete explosion of craziness in the Mideast, and Obama’s inconsistency with longtime allies like Mubarak and the leaders of Bahrain (where the US has a large military presence), suggests he’s torn.  But he’s torn between two equally ineffective “idealistic” approaches to foreign policy.  On one hand, he is like George W. Bush and supports [...]

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The Deepest Cuts

I wrote not too long ago about how ridiculous it is Obama has essentially quadrupled deficit spending, and created an astronomically expensive new entitlement, while demanding deep cuts from the military.  This is undobutedly the fruit of his early 1980s, Nuclear Freeze, anti-military worldview. I personally think the Pentagon could save a lot of money [...]

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The Sovietization of the US Military

The Soviet system privileged party officials, political correctness, and ideological rectitude above all, even military competence.  Commissars were placed alongside combat officers to ensure loyalty to party goals.  Big decisions were made in ridiculously bad ways because of ideological blinders and commitments that saw “class conflict” and the “wheel of history” where it was absent. [...]

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The New Model Army

DADT will become law soon, passed this week by the lame duck Democratic Senate after earlier passage by the House.  I oppose this law for all the usual reasons. Like the gay rights movement as a whole, this is part of a broader cultural movement:  destruction of the military and other traditional institutions in the [...]

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