Although Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal's plan for wresting the Afghan provinces of Helmand and Kandahar from the Taliban is still in its early stages of implementation, there are already signs that setbacks and obstacles it has encountered have raised serious doubts...
The Pentagon's lame-excuse directorate has a new reason why we're not winning our woeful war on -ism. The “Blame Cell,” in its various ad hoc and formal manifestations, has been successfully warding off culpability for the Defense Department's failures since the...
The Pentagon was still trying to spin its report on the war in Afghanistan issued this week as holding out hope because the instability had leveled off, even as some news outlets were noting that it documents the continued expansion of Taliban capabilities and...
"Bonded in the crucible of the Kandahar mission, a new group of civil servants has emerged as the government's go-to team for the most challenging and dangerous assignments of the day. Tougher, faster, more flexible, and more networked, these officials epitomize...
Like most sound tenets of military art, the concepts of "objective" and "measures of effectiveness" have been corrupted by America's present military leadership. At his Senate confirmation hearing in June 2009, then-Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal...
Yes, we could. No kidding. We really could withdraw our massive armies, now close to 200,000 troops combined, from Afghanistan and Iraq (and that's not even counting our similarly large stealth army of private contractors, which helps keep the true size of our double...
The latest bunker mentality bunk to emanate from Gen. Stanley McChrystal, commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, is that he has too many civilian contractors hoofing around on his turf. Back in June 2009, a "civilian surge" was a key component of...
An opinion survey of Afghanistan's Kandahar province funded by the U.S. Army has revealed that 94 percent of respondents support negotiating with the Taliban over military confrontation with the insurgent group and 85 percent regard the Taliban as "our Afghan...
