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Libya
Over the past nine months there has been a wave of fatal attacks by Afghan security forces, either soldiers or police, on Coalition soldiers. The colloquial term for this is “green on blue” violence where green are friendly forces, blue represents U.S. and Coalition troops and red means enemies
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Date:
9/24/2012
In many ways, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta is the antithesis of his predecessor, Robert Gates. He is a consensus-builder who tries to work with the military services rather than dictating to them. But when it comes to concerns for the future of the NATO alliance Panetta appears to be channeling
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Date:
10/5/2011
Washington as a whole and defense experts, in particular, are bracing for massive reductions in defense spending coming out of the deliberations of the Congressional super committee. If automatic budget cuts are triggered, defense could see budgets decline by around $1 trillion over the next decade.
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Date:
8/24/2011
As Libyan rebels solidify their control over that country's capital and the Gaddafi regime appears on its last legs, pundits are already rushing to talk about managing the post-rebellion political situation. Their time might be better spent considering the military lessons of the Libyan campaign
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Date:
8/22/2011
One of the eye-opening features of the three month old NATO air campaign in Libya is the hollowness of the world’s premier military alliance, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Let’s be honest, this is not a major conventional war against a capable adversary. The real challenge for NATO
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Date:
7/1/2011
The ongoing NATO air campaign in Libya is providing two interrelated lessons for the future of the Alliance as a military instrument. The first is you play with what you pay for. Or in the case of NATO it might be stated if you don’t pay you cannot play. The lack of investment by this country’s
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Date:
6/23/2011
Over the past decade, the U.S. military have mastered the fine art of counterinsurgency, or COIN. When the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan began, the military had neither the theories nor capabilities to practice counterinsurgency. Slowly, painfully, it developed the doctrine, strategy and tactics,
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Date:
5/17/2011
Does anyone think that the administration’s strategy for Libya is working? Respected defense expert Anthony Cordesman characterized the U.S.-backed NATO-led campaign as a farce -- one that repeats virtually all the errors made by the Bush Administration in Iraq. The Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs
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Date:
4/22/2011
How many countries have sought to reassure their publics that they were not getting involved in someone else’s civil war by promising that they were just sending advisors? President Kennedy was just sending advisors to South Vietnam. Five years later there were half a million U.S. troops in country.
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Date:
4/20/2011
What can one say about a nation, a superpower, that starts a war ostensibly in order to save innocent lives and then walks away from the conflict taking its unique military capabilities with it and thereby ensuring that it is prolonged and those same civilians suffer? This goes way beyond the bystander
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Date:
4/13/2011
The “war” in Libya is two months old. The fortunes of both sides have ebbed and flowed with government forces recently driving the rebels back almost to the gates of Benghazi, their capitol. NATO airstrikes continue with some 25 of Ghadaffi’s tanks destroyed over the weekend. At the same time, the
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Date:
4/11/2011
The current Libyan air operation may be the last of its kind. What I mean by this is an operation involving fourth-generation aircraft against Soviet-era defenses or single-digit surface-to-air missiles (SAMs). To date, the campaign has been as much an air show as combat operation with an array
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Date:
3/31/2011
The current U.S. air campaign in Libya is being described as a low-cost operation. It isn't. The federal government has spent many trillions of dollars building and sustaining a global military posture capable of dealing expeditiously with the likes of Col. Gadhafi. Our allies have not made similar
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Date:
3/29/2011
All great powers have had their military auxiliaries, myrmidons or sidekicks. Throughout history, nation has fought nation with the winner turning around and making the loser, assuming they fought well, a part of their military. No one did this as well as Great Britain. Sometimes British governments
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Date:
3/28/2011
Remember the good old days in American defense policy a decade ago, when President Bush could decide to invade a far-away country that few Americans had ever heard of, and get a 90 percent approval rating -- not to mention nearly unanimous support from the global community? All it took was a devastating
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Date:
3/25/2011
The coalition air operation against Muammar Ghadaffi has demonstrated the enormous capacity of the U.S. military. Precision weapons took out Ghadaffi's surface-to-air missile sites and aircraft shelters. E/A-18G Growlers jammed Libyan electronics. F-15s and F-16s conducted both counter-air and surface-attack
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Date:
3/22/2011
As I understand it, the thrust of the White House plan for the Libyan intervention is to provide an initial intense "blast" of U.S. military power and then fade into the background while our allies take on the remaining effort. However, this presumes that the allies are capable of performing even
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Date:
3/21/2011
The debate over the rationale and wisdom of imposing a no-fly zone over Libya has been intensifying in recent days with former senior DoD and State Department officials from the Clinton, Bush and Obama Administrations weighing in. Proponents have argued for imposing a no-fly zone in terms of humanitarian
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Date:
3/10/2011