On Combat

Alex Kershaw’s The Few: The American “Knights of the Air” Who Risked Everything to Save Britain in the Summer of 1940 is an exciting biographical narrative about three American flyers who left the United States in 1940 to fly against Hitler’s Germany.
The heroic profiles penned by Kershaw paint a vivid picture of the joys […]

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Mass reenlistments are a significant affirmation of American fighting men and women’s fighting spirit. On 4 July, 2008, nearly 1% of all American service members in Iraq elected to reenlist in a ceremony committing them to 5,500 man-years of military service. (See Army.mil/news: 1,215 Servicemembers re-up in Iraq). This ceremony more than doubled last […]

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The Department of Defense released recent Al Qaeda video of Iraqi children being prepared for terror missions. An estimated 250,000 children are being used as soldiers in strife-ridden areas such as Africa. Some of the data collected to date on child soldiers may help better understand this crop of potential child terrorists:
Recruitment Motivation: Forced […]

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Another F-15C was lost 2 Feb off the coast of Hawaii; the cause is yet to be determined, and may prove to be material failure or pilot error–we’ll have to wait on the USAF’s investigation. For the initial report see: Pilot OK after F-15 crash off Hawaii coast
This string of F-15C failures usually leads to […]

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The USAF has approximately three hundred and fifty specially-trained snipers, many serving in “close precision engagement teams.” Close is a relative term for the USAF, which operates long-range strike aircraft such as the B-2, air-launched cruise missiles with hundreds of mile ranges. Precision is an appropriate term for a sniper due to the extreme accuracy […]

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Today I had the privilege of listening to Dr Stuart Rochester and Dr Frederick Kiley discuss their book Honor Bound: American Prisoners of War in Southeast Asia, 1961-1973. Dr Kiley recounted examples of duty and endurance under the harshest conditions. He described the brutality of the North Vietnamese torture and how American POWs found ingenious […]

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Clausewitz defined war as a trinity of violence in pursuit of a political purpose, affected by chance.
The possibility of death or injury from violent action is a powerful element of battlefield realities WWII soldier and author James Jones (From Here to Eternity, and The Thin Red line, among others) wrote that soldiers had to […]

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Why are civilians attracted to the fight in Iraq and what keeps them there? Motivations are more complex than simply the appeal of money. The Washington Post’s Steve Fainaru’s narrative of four security guards abducted in Iraq provides a small glimpse into the motivation of some of the thousands of armed civilians at war.
Many contractors are […]

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This week combat commanders rejected a recommendation by Army psychiatric community to control operational stress through frequent in theater rotations. (See USA Today 19 June 2007: “Troop’s 1-Month Break Blocked“) The specific recommendation was for units to rotate out of the line for one month out of every four. The benefits would include maintenance of unit […]

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Last month’s publication of the Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) mental health assessment indicates a long-term problem for American warriors: repeat deployments are drawing from a finite well of courage, and the well isn’t re-filling between deployments.
Last month the Army Surgeon General’s office posted its fourth OIF Mental Health Assessment Team (MHAT) report dated November 2006. […]

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