What is it about the French? Or, at least French leadership. True, much of US leadership hasn’t been terribly stellar over the past century, but there’s something about the arrogance of French leaders that’s remarkable. >> >> In July 2017, just two months after assuming office as President of France, Emmanuel Macron canceled the traditional […]

Well before being sworn in as President, Eisenhower was considering options to end the fighting in Korea. Eisenhower’s solution was to make it clear to the leadership in Russia, China, and North Korea that South Korea was now firmly under the US nuclear shield, the nuclear umbrella, as it came to be known. Consideration of […]

There is a wonderful scene in the movie “the Wind and the Lion,” a fictionalized account of the kidnapping of Ion Perdicaris by Mulai Ahmed el Raisuli, Emir of the Jebala tribes, that asks an important question. At the very end of the movie, the Raisuli (played to perfection by Sean Connery) has lost his […]

Editor’s Note: So there is the excitement on The Hill this morning, and we could talk about that. The minutes are fading away in a vista abruptly truncated by the hands of the clock tonight. We oldsters have a saying for that, but I can’t remember what it is. In terms of The Hill, there […]

The mess that was the US and NATO departure from Afghanistan is officially over, but pieces of it grind on. One estimate suggests there may be 500 US citizens remaining in Kabul itself, hundreds more (if not thousands) scattered around the rest of the country, and, per one of the several advocacy groups, more than […]

What country harbored Al Qaeda and the Taliban after they left Afghanistan in 2002? What country provided substantial, detailed support to Libyan, Iranian and North Korean nuclear weapons development programs? What country provided overflight rights to the US to access Afghanistan from 2001 to 2021, in exchange for more than $1 billion in military aid […]

The US Army did not win the war in Europe in 1945. Leaving aside any argument about what the US and the British and others did versus what the Russian Army did, the two tasks given to the US Army were somewhat more limited in scope: Marshall tasked the Army to “Enter the Continent of […]

You can already hear the first faint echoes of the experts running through the halls of power in Washington, screaming, Cassandra like: “I told them! I told them!” Hmmm… Years ago, Michael Handel, a professor at the Naval War College, made the point that an intelligence officer’s duty was not simply to gather the facts […]

In a recent article a former Marine castigated the Generals and Admirals of the last 20 years who notably have been unable to achieve anything close to victory in Afghanistan, but who are now casting about for those to blame. The sad truth is that many, indeed most, of those in a position to have […]

          Fires happen on ships. And they can be quite destructive. There have been a number of major fires on aircraft carriers that were nearly catastrophic; Oriskany (1953), Bennington (1955), Oriskany (1966), Forrestal (1967), Enterprise (1969), Constellation (1988). And, while not technically an aircraft carrier, Bonhomme Richard last year. The distinction is that in all the cases except one, the ships returned to operational status in less […]