Outside the Beltway

My first piece for RealClearDefense, “Enough with the QDR Hype,” has published.

The military’s finance and accounting system has been dysfunctional for decades and is getting worse.

Military coups used to be far more common than they are today.

The GOP is going to have to come up with a lot more than just age if they end up facing off against Hillary Clinton in 2016.

The blowback from yesterday’s revelations about U.S. surveillance on European allies continues.

The latest NSA leaks are likely to prove to be diplomatically embarrassing.

Some really bad advice for the GOP.

Jerry Brown’s second go-round as governor has been very, very good to the Golden State.

Edward Snowden has likely violated many laws, but, absent additional facts, treason is not one of them.

Does it matter if political leaders like each other on some personal level? Sometimes it does.

The United States is as politically polarized as it was in 1865.

The politics of gun control is not nearly as easy as its supporters believe it to be.

My latest for The National Interest, “Hagel’s Three Questions,” ponders our national security decisionmaking.

Examining SECDEF’s call for radical overhaul of our defense structure against the fate of similar calls past.

The Iraq War did significant damage to the legacy of the Republican Party.

Providing a little context for Pope Francis’ background+Erick Erickson needs to learn a little history.

Walter Russell Mead presents his sitrep of the War on Terror.

Andrew Bacevich bemoans the social impact of the all-volunteer force.

Minting a Platinum Coin would be a really bad idea.

Without question, Barack Obama won the foreign policy debate in the 2012 campaign.

First in a series of posts looking at the substance of the final presidential debate, ostensibly about foreign policy.

President Obama seems to have given away the store when it comes to the defense sequestration cuts.

Like the men who came before him, Barack Obama has vastly increased the powers of his office. Someone should have asked him about that last night.

Mitt Romney is once again making completely false claims about the status of the United States Navy.

Let’s take a trip back in time to see what some conservatives thought 2012 would look like if Barack Obama were elected President.

With Mitt Romney and Barack Obama basically saying the same things about foreign policy, it’s time to take a look at an alternative.

The Romney campaign’s critique of the President’s foreign policy record is weak, and based on bad history.

President Obama didn’t blow the doors off the Time Warner Cable Arena last night, but he didn’t need to.

The GOP claims to be a party that favors limited government, but its foreign policy positions reveal this to be little more than a lie.

Today’s convention activities will include the opening salvos of an attack on the President’s foreign policy. This strikes me as a mistake.

A former Obama official says government should learn from business, but is private industry really more efficient?

Some troubling, sad, and downright puzzling stories

For the first time in 80 years, there are no veterans on the major party Presidential tickets.

Examining a history that might have been.

The US government has an odd and unproductive view on the concept of talks.

Were the Colonists wrong to toss aside the British Empire so casually?

Mitt Romney’s confrontational approach to Russia makes no sense.