Pentagon

By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – US troops and the Kurdish and Arab fighters among whom they are embedded came under a coordinated attack by pro-Damascus militias on late Wednesday into Thursday morning. The action took place in Deir al-Zor Province, in Syria’s far east. It is possible that the pro-regime militias […]

Foreign Policy

Can American Democracy survive six Standing Wars?

contributors

William J. Astore | ( Tomdispatch.com ) | – – Whether the rationale is the need to wage a war on terror involving 76 countries or renewed preparations for a struggle against peer competitors Russia and China (as Defense Secretary James Mattis suggested recently while introducing America’s new National Defense Strategy), the U.S. military is […]

Arms Sales

Huge Military Budgets Make Us Broke, Not Safe

contributors

By Miriam Pemberton | (Otherwords.org) | – – Backing down from nuclear war would make us a lot safer than piling more money into the Pentagon. We’re all tense. Hearing about our fellow citizens in Hawaii scrambling around, looking for a place to hide from a nuclear bomb, will do that to you. So will […]

Donald Trump

Countering Turkish Propaganda, Pentagon reports 150 ISIL Killed in Airstrikes

Juan Cole

By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – The front page news today that US and coalition aircraft (mostly American joined by French and British pilots) struck last Saturday at an ISIL base in eastern Syria where hundreds of fighters had regrouped, killing 150 of them. There are lots of question marks about this […]

Pentagon

Top Trump officials, in Syria’s Raqqa, vow “Stabilization” w/out “Reconstruction”

Juan Cole

Middle East Monitor | – – The US government’s aid chief, Mark Green, made an unannounced visit to Raqqa in Syria on Monday, the most senior US civilian official from the Trump administration to visit the war-struck northern city months after it was retaken from Daesh, Reuters reports. Green was accompanied by head of the […]

Afghanistan

12 Strong. The Inside Story on the Making of a (Refreshingly Accurate) Hollywood War Epic

contributors

By Brian Glyn Williams (with Julie Romei) | (Informed Comment) | – – When I received a phone call from a representative for famed producer Jerry Bruckheimer to visit the remote mountains of New Mexico to see the filming set for the forthcoming Afghan war movie, 12 Strong: The True Declassified Story of the Horse […]

Arms Sales

Trump Admin flooding Planet with high Tech Weapons; What could Go Wrong?

contributors

Military-Industrial Complex Set for Huge Expansion

Pentagon

Burn Pits and Toxins: Are 800 US Bases abroad Scofflaw Polluters?

contributors

H. Patricia Hynes | (Informed Comment) | – – My nephew, an Army veteran who spent most of his 20 plus years military service as an officer in South Korea, is now a civilian military contractor living on a base in Afghanistan. Our only conversation about US military pollution in South Korea was something of […]

National Security State

From Afghanistan to Somalia, Special Ops Achieves Less with More

contributors

By Nick Turse | ( Tomdispatch.com) | – – At around 11 o’clock that night, four Lockheed MC-130 Combat Talons, turboprop Special Operations aircraft, were flying through a moonless sky from Pakistani into Afghan airspace. On board were 199 Army Rangers with orders to seize an airstrip. One hundred miles to the northeast, Chinook and […]