Maj. Danny Sjursen, USA (ret.)

The tributes to the late President Idriss Deby just poured in last week – especially from Western leaders. And boy were the condolences nauseating – at least to anyone vaguely familiar with Chad and its longtime strongman, or those even faintly fond of decency. The worst of it came – unsurprisingly and unapologetically – from … Continue reading “Our ‘Dear Friend’ Deby Is Dead – Yea, About That…”

Make no mistake: much policy indecency is permitted and enabled by vacuously vague bureaucratic reports peddling in platitudes. For further evidence bolstering this increasingly open-and-shut case, see Exhibit number 3,472, or so: last week’s release of the Annual Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community – the latest contribution from that politest of polite militarists, … Continue reading “America’s Intel Vampires Can’t See Themselves in the Mirror: DNI’s Hypocritical and Self-Awareness-Absent Annual Threat Assessment”

Washington’s hypocrisy and the frontiers of its New Cold War (of choice) appear to know no bounds. Eastern Europe is the classic theater of course, but you’ll hear the Pentagon’s new buzzword-acronym priority purpose, "great power competition" (GPC) – etched in senseless stone with the 2018 National Defense Strategy (NDS) – peddled to justify military … Continue reading “Frozen Farce: Russia Alarmism – Arctic Edition”

White faces in fatigues – I’m sure that’s just what most Mozambicans were hoping to see upon their shores. After all, it certainly isn’t the first time. Ever since the Portuguese started planting trading posts and forts on what was known as the Swahili Coast around the year 1500, an arrival of armed whites has never … Continue reading “It Began With Twelve, How Will It End? – Mozambique: AFRICOM’s Newest Adventure”

Counterinsurgency snake oil was sold to soldiers and civilians alike as a "new" brand of urbane and civilized warfare. The absurdly over-the-top euphemistic buzzwords and mantras applied to such strategies – "stability-" and "information" "operations," "handshakes&hand grenades," or "nation builders as well as warriors" – should’ve tipped us off that something severely dark was concealed … Continue reading “‘Made Possible by Viewers Taxpayers Like You’: French African-Adventurism & Wedding-Bombings”

Let the record show that the almighty American military machine was soundly defeated by an enemy that didn’t like fighting either in the dark or cold. Talk about bad medicine that’s good for a society (somehow still) desperately in need of a decisive case study in the limits of its own power and martial prowess. … Continue reading “This Is Their Year!: The Taliban MLB Franchise Favored To Win It All”

When does neo-imperialist subtext tip over to overt imperialism? Well, when it comes to America’s Africa policy, apparently it’s when Foreign Affairs indulges the published fantasies of a multigenerational military trio of facsimile David Petraeuses peddling un-ironic Rudyard Kipling reprises. In the piece in question, retired Air Force Major General Marcus Hicks, and U.S. Army … Continue reading “The Military’s Africa Gambit: Faux Intellectuals and Their False Assumptions Strike Again”

After some hints to the contrary, it turns out French troops in the Sahel aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. So said President Emmanuel Macron in Paris on February 16, even before his virtual summit with France’s former-colonial "partners" – Burkina Faso, Niger, Mali, Mauritania, and Chad – comprising the G5 Sahel Joint Force. Formed in … Continue reading “We Need To Talk About Chad: Franco-America’s Favorite Hired Gun”

Secretary of State Anthony Blinken might have been "outraged” by a rocket attack on a U.S. base in northern Iraq – that killed a foreign contractor and wounded an American service member and several other contractors – but he shouldn’t have been surprised. After all, it’s the muddled US military mission and ongoing troop presence … Continue reading “All Risk, No Reward: The Perils and Absurdity of Iraq War 4.0”

February 9th marked the first time in nearly two decades that the U.S. military went one full year without a trooper killed in Afghanistan action. Now, with newly minted President Biden weighing his Afghan options – and under immense bipartisan insider pressure to stay-put or even ramp-up – a simple question leaps forth: Does Amtrak … Continue reading “We’ve Gone a Year Without a Combat Death in Afghanistan – Will Biden Break the Streak?”