Soldier Mom Refuses Deployment

A sad and not terribly unusual case: An Army cook and single mom may face criminal charges after she skipped her deployment flight to Afghanistan because, she said, no one was available to care for her infant son while she was overseas. Spc. Alexis Hutchinson, 21, claims she had no choice but to refuse deployment orders because the only family ...

Military Needs More Muslims

Robert Kaplan thinks that it would be a shame if the Fort Hood massacre led to recriminations against Muslims in the U.S. military, arguing we need more of them. The massacre at Fort Hood, Texas, in which 13 soldiers were shot and killed by Army Maj. Nidal Hasan, paradoxically took my memory back to April 2004, when I was embedded with ...

Fort Hood Fallen: Victims, Not Heroes

President Obama's speech at yesterday's memorial service for the victims of the Fort Hood massacre was touching and struck the right chords. Marc Ambinder and Taegan Goddard both say it was his best speech, ever, and Chuck Todd gushes that it will be "remembered and quoted from for quite some time." Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about ...

Hasan a Muslim First, American Second?

In hindsight, it appears that Major Nidal Malik Hasan, the mass murderer who killed 14 (one of the soldiers killed, Francheska Velez, was six weeks pregnant) and wounded another 30 at Fort Hood, had long made it known that he sympathized with the enemy. Bloomberg's Justin Blum: Major Nidal Malik Hasan, the Army psychiatrist accused of a shooting spree that killed ...

Pentagon Expected To Ask For Supplementary War Funding. As Usual.

Remember a couple of weeks ago, when Congress passed a $680 billion appropriation? Well, don't worry--the military will be getting still more money:The nation’s top military officer said Wednesday that he expected the Pentagon to ask Congress in the next few months for emergency financing to support the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, even though President Obama has pledged ...

Shipping Off

The Atlantic Council is sending a delegation of us out to the USS Eisenhower for the next couple of days. Barring unforeseen access to a computer, the Internet, and free time that means no posting from me until Saturday morning.  My OTB colleagues will, however, be slavishly posting away as usual if not at a slightly higher opstempo.

Military Bureaucracy

Two separate reviews of The Fourth Star, a new book by David Cloud and Greg Jaffee, touch on a theme that has fascinated me since I wrote a dissertation on the subject. NYT foreign correspondent Dexter Filkins (via SWJ): “The Fourth Star” paints wonderfully dramatic portraits of the four senior officers highlighted here, but at its heart it’s a story about bureaucracy. ...

BRAC, Ft. Belvoir, and Northern Virginia Traffic

Virginia Congressman Jim Moran argues that the Defense Department ought to step up and pay for the increased traffic BRAC is about to bring to his district: The latest round of BRAC (Base Realignment and Closing) moves is poised to create a daytime nightmare of traffic congestion for Northern Virginia. Over the next two years, the on-base population at Fort Belvoir in ...

Predator vs. Terminator

This xkcd comic is indeed "More Accurate." via Andrew Exum

Military Recruiting Sets Records

Armed forces recruiting is at its highest levels in the all-volunteer era, Ann Scott Tyson reports for WaPo. For the first time in more than 35 years, the U.S. military has met all of its annual recruiting goals, as hundreds of thousands of young people have enlisted despite the near-certainty that they will go to war. The Pentagon, which made the announcement ...

War and Peace Prizes

Continuing the delayed reaction to news that is the permanent fate of columnists in an instant analysis world, both Tom Friedman and David Von Drehle have similar and counterintuitive ideas on who the Nobel Peace Prize should have gone to, instead of a United States president with two weeks in office. The former suggests Obama accept the award "on behalf of ...

Jim Jones, Republican Whipping Boy

Michael Goldfarb wrote a piece for the Weekly Standard blog with the provocative title "Rent-a-General Jim Jones," arguing that the man who spent four decades serving his country as an officer in the Marine Corps, rising to Commandant and then Supreme Allied Commander, is a partisan stooge for the Obama administration. A friend emails to point out that Jones is "finally ...

Obama vs. the Generals

I'm vacationing in Ixtapa, Mexico this week and have been mostly ignoring the news since Friday afternoon. Via memeorandum, I see that the underground fight between General Stanley McChrystal and the Obama administration that I blogged on last week has kicked into high gear and that a new player has joined the fight: General David Petraeus. Alex Spillious of The ...

McChrystal and MacArthur

Speaking at London's International Institute for Strategic Studies, Stanley McChrystal, the general in charge of the NATO mission in Afghanistan, said the Obama administration needs to make up its mind on quickly on a strategy — and rejected the idea of lowering the bar. In my writeup for New Atlanticist, "McChrystal: Biden Afghanistan Plan 'Short-Sighted," I observe that, This isn't exactly Douglas ...

Mark Lippert Leaves NSC for SEALs

Now here's something you don't see every day:  Mark Lippert, chief of staff of the National Security Council and a close friend of President Obama, has decided to leave the administration to return to active duty in the Navy.  George Stephanopoulos reports: When Barack Obama came to the Senate, Mark Lippert -- a veteran Senate aide and newly-minted Naval Reserve officer ...