In a recent interview with Der Spiegel, General Petraeus reiterated his anti-corruption push, in which he tells his troops to be careful where they spend their money. With the latest stories from DC that show folks like Blackwater/Xe, KBR, and other US contractors getting off the hook, you have to wonder if the strategy of “Do As We Say, Not As We Do” will ever work. And if it won’t, then why do we continue to spend money and lives to keep pursuing it?

The Pentagon’s public relations machine is working overtime these days trying to sell a theme of "progress" in Afghanistan to push back against calls to end the war. The message machine behind this push is gargantuan, costing $547 million and employing more than 27,000 people. But, as our latest Rethink Afghanistan video shows, all that [...]

AndyS In Colorado has done a wonderful send up of the DODT spouse’s survey that the Pentagon is wasting hundreds of thousands of dollars on.

The attitudeof our troops and their families is best described by the answer: Cucumber Salad

On Monday it’s expected that the Washington Post will debut a series by Dana Priest on military contractors, with an emphasis on intelligence contracting. We’ve known for some time there are far more contractors than troops, that we don’t know the exact number — which makes for a lot of interesting questions.

Last week, U.S. District Judge Henry H. Kennedy, Jr. released a forceful 36-page opinion in the case of a Guantanamo detainee that would ordinarily be shocking. Sadly, such opinions are now so common that, except for one news story and a few particularly alert bloggers, they get barely a mention in the news.

Defense Secretary Gates wants to extricate himself and the president from the impending P.R. disaster shaping up around the flailing Kandahar operation set for this Fall. "I think it’s important to remember that Kandahar is not Afghanistan," Gates said in comments that appeared to play down a U.S.-led operation for control of the area, known [...]

The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday morning issued a stunning ruling: that the United States government may seize suspected terrorists outside the United States, send them to the U.S.-run Bagram detention center in Afghanistan, and thereby deprive them of the right to challenge their detention in federal court.

Special Operations, in its battle to stop terrorism, relies on “find, fix, finish and follow-up”. The problem is that “find” is not working, perhaps due to turf battles between CIA and DoD.