Blowback From U.S. Policy in the Greater Middle East He was shot in the back, the ultimate act of treachery. On September 3rd, a U.S Army sergeant major was killed by two Afghan police officers—the very people his unit, the new Security Force Assistance Brigade, was there to train. It was the second fatal “insider...
Something for Everyone (in the Military-Industrial Complex) Think of it as the chicken-or-the-egg question for the ages: Do very real threats to the United States inadvertently benefit the military-industrial complex or does the national security state, by its very nature, conjure up inflated threats to feed that defense machine? Back in 2008, some of us...
War Without War Powers (the Not-So-New American Way) On September 1, 1970, soon after President Nixon expanded the Vietnam War by invading neighboring Cambodia, Democratic Senator George McGovern, a decorated World War II veteran and future presidential candidate, took to the floor of the Senate and said, “Every Senator [here] is partly responsible for sending...
Counterinsurgency, Policing, and the Militarization of America’s Cities “This . . . thing, [the War on Drugs] this ain’t police work . . . I mean, you call something a war and pretty soon everybody gonna be running around acting like warriors . . . running around on a damn crusade, storming corners, slapping on...
The author, plotting coordinates for an airstrike during an ambush in Pashmul, Afghanistan, 2011. We walked in a single file. Not because it was tactically sound. It wasn’t—at least according to standard infantry doctrine. Patrolling southern Afghanistan in column formation limited maneuverability, made it difficult to mass fire, and exposed us to enfilading machine-gun bursts....