Shot In The Dark

Above And Beyond The Call: SFC Paul R. Smith

Today the MOB is paying our respects to the memory of Sergeant First Class Paul R. Smith - the first Congressional Medal of Honor winner in the War on Terror. Today would have been Sergeant Smith's birthday. In the movie...

Low Point?

Those of us who've been interested in military history for a long time recall the exploits of the Israeli military; their victories against vastly larger enemies in 1948 and 1956, their dashing pre-emptive gutting of an imminent Egyptian, Syrian, Jordanian...

I Don't Think That Word Means What You Think It Means

The new weapons system rolled out, to muted fanfare... ...and intense criticism. The system was awash in new technology - revolutionary technology, which promised change the face of, if not warfare itself, at least the niche in warfare that the...

The Warrior and the Gerbil

Picture this. Imagine a group of 18 year old American kids; snotty, insolent, spoiled (even the ones from poor backgrounds; by world standards, we're all spoiled rotten), used to being held to low expectations, triained by a media society to...

Perils of Pragmatism

I originally found this before the Inauguration. It got lost in the shuffle - but in the wake of the SOTU speech, seems even more appropriate. It's Victor Davis Hanson, on the perils of poo-poohing idealism....

From the "Talk Talk" File

I had almost thought the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists had gone out of business. No such luck. Their annoying little "Doomsday Clock" is still ticking - and, amazingly, it's at seven minutes 'til Midnight! Closer than during the Cuban...

Submitted Without Comment

A group is digging through evidence of old, discontinued weapons programs:THE Pentagon considered developing a host of non-lethal chemical weapons that would disrupt discipline and morale among enemy troops, newly declassified documents reveal. Most bizarre among the plans was one...

Armor This

Suddenly, the armored Humvee is is the cause celebre among people who, a year ago, thought the term Armored Humvee was something pertaining to the impeachment of Clinton. The latest National Review editorial notes the context in which the issue...

The Regulars

Max Boot is one of our best current military historians. Yesterday's column (via Powerline) is his thanks for one of our most underappreciated institutions; the volunteer military. The whole article is worth a read, but this section is important:In their...

Perestroika on the Peninsula

As rumors swirl that Kim Jong-Il has been shot, the Pyongyang regime is apparently seeking a return to the six-partite talks that Kim poo-poohed:North Korea wants urgently to restart six-party talks on its nuclear programmes, but is still demanding certain...

Happy Birthday, USMC

The Gun Club is 229 today. In honor of the Corps' birthday, all current and former Leathernecks (and serving, reserve and former members of all services) need to observe the Twelfth General Order and get down to Keegans' Irish Pub....

The KSTP Video

Kerry supporters jumped on yesterday's release of video from St. Paul ABC affiliate KSTP-TV like it was the last bag of closet-grown grass at a Kucinich fundraiser. The video purported, according to the leftybloggers, to show the presence of RDX...

Better Late Than Never

Generalissimo Duane finds a story most have overlooked:A funny thing has started to happen over the last few weeks. People actually started reading the report. And what they have found, by and large, has scared the pants off of them,...

Stretched Too Thin

Part of the support for last week's Democrat fraud - the spurious rumors of an impending draft - was the notion that "we're stretched too thin", and that there's no way to get enough manpower under a volunteer system to...

Franks Carpetbombs Kerry

As a student of military history, few things have irritated me as badly as John Kerry's consistent spinning of the campaign in Tora Bora as a mistake by the President. I'll be charitable, and call it a "misstatement" on Kerry's...

Social Networks

Last year when I first wrote "Berg's Law of Liberal Iraq Commentary", I listed the four major reasons we went to war in Iraq:WMDs (which, we now know, Hussein had the institutional knowledge to re-build very quickly)Repeated violations of UN...

Teaching Old Armies New Tricks

Americans are used to the notion that our military can pretty much pick up at any time, and fight any war, anywhere. It's enshrined in US military lore:From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli, we'll fight our...

The Test

Whenever I read many liberals' take on things like foreign policy and defense, I grit my teeth and fume; "Someone should make these people take a test on foreign policy and defense before allowing them to vote for candidates for...

Technicality of Mass Distraction -

Josh "Joshua Micah" Marsall is spinning the Dean "Screw the UN" letter. Those who think the media and the left give Dean a walk on this issue because they're reflexively anti-Bush are wrong, says Marshall. Oh, no, not even...

They're Planners. They Plan

In 1919, the US Army put together the most current version of its "Red Plan" - contingency plans for an invasion. From our ally, Great Britain. Via Canada. The plan called, among other things, for the military evacuation of the...

The Clinton Military meets the Dean Foreign Policy

Some pundits on the left continue to point at the results in Iraq and Afghanistan, and get the sort of grin you see from toddlers who've just made really good pants, and yell "See! The 'Clinton Military' wasn't so bad...

Paging Sun Tzu

I'm always amazed at the Democrats who believe that if Hussein falls without a shot being fired, it's a defeat for Bush. The great Chinese military philosopher Sun Tzu said the best war is the one that didn' have...

Democrats and Defense

Why it never quite clicks with them - written from a Dem's point of view.The reasons for this apathy aren't hard to discern. Many Democrats who came of age during the Vietnam War retain a gut-level distrust of the military....

Snakeeaters

- This is a fascinating - and long - article on the life and creation of a special forces soldier - the ones that won the war in Afghanistan, and are probably in action in Iraq even now. Long -...