Army

Plus, Isaiah Crowell's new butt wipes.

Remember "Juicero"? Get ready for "Raw Water." The Silicon Valley company mocked for its pointless technology replicating squeezing (really) is in the news again after one of its founders was quoted in a New York Times story about "raw water." It is dumber than it sounds:

Every schoolboy ought to know—but probably doesn’t—the famous couplet from Rudyard Kipling’s “Tommy”: “Yes, makin’ mock o’ uniforms that guard you while you sleep / Is cheaper than them uniforms, an’ they’re starvation cheap.” George Orwell, though he held that Kipling did not “understand the…

The selection of Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster to be President Trump's new National Security Advisor has received near universal praise. But understanding why McMaster is highly regarded is another matter altogether. Here's list of illuminating articles on McMaster that helps explain why he's one of the…

President Donald Trump has named U.S. Army lieutenant general H.R. McMaster to be his new national security advisor. The Monday afternoon announcement comes nearly one week after Mike Flynn was asked to resign from the job following revelations he had misled the White House on his conversations…

Top Republican lawmakers are ripping President Obama's last-minute decision to commute the bulk of former Army Private Chelsea Manning's 35-year prison sentence.

Vincent Viola, a businessman who owns the Florida Panthers hockey team and served in the U.S. Army on active and reserve duty, has been tapped by President-elect Donald Trump to be the Secretary of the Army. Reuters has more:

The last German offensive of World War II began at 5:30 a.m. on December 16, 1944. The rank-and-file German soldier thought he was giving Paris back to the Führer for a "Christmas present." The more experienced Wehrmacht commanders knew that, even should they reach the Meuse or—more…

Arkansas senator Tom Cotton, an Army veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, has proposed a $26-billion "emergency" supplement to next year's defense budget. Speaking on the floor of the Senate Wednesday, the freshman Republican noted the threats from a resurgent Russia, an aggressive China, and a…

The award for the week's most depressing opening sentence in a news story goes to this gem by T. Rees Shapiro of the Washington Post:

The award for the week’s most depressing opening sentence in a news story goes to this gem by T. Rees Shapiro of the Washington Post:

As the 2016 Republican National Convention began, GOP chairman Reince Priebus spoke with confidence about the coming transformation of presumptive nominee Donald Trump. "He knows the pivot is important," Priebus said. "He has been better and I think he's going to be great moving forward." Priebus…

When Ash Carter stood at the podium on December 3 to reveal the most profound social change in military policy in at least a half-century, he stood alone. Absent from the defense secretary's announcement that all ground combat jobs were to be opened to women were the uniformed service chiefs and…

The blogger Angry Staff Officer writes at taskandpurpose.com that

It happened after World War II and it happened after Vietnam.  Now, after years of repeated deployments, the Army, as Robert H. Scales writes the U.S. Army is breaking down.

The Army and the Navy cannot do what they once could and might soon be required to do again.  They don’t have enough soldiers and enough ships.  Even reduced to the lowest force levels in years, the Army, as USA Today reports:

A top commander in southwest Asia reminded U.S military personnel stationed in Muslim countries in the Middle East of the restrictions placed on them during Ramadan. According to a report by the U.S. Air Forces Central Command Public Affairs, Brig. Gen. John Quintas, 380th Air Expeditionary Wing…

President Obama was counting strokes on the golf course at Fort Belvoir in northern Virginia last Saturday, but the day before a $91,318.76 contract was awarded to count something quite different at Fort Belvoir: bats. The Virginia Department of Conservation and Recreation will conduct the "Bat…

Can the United States maintain a "limited" military force in Iraq to stop the Islamist militants targeting ethnic minorities in that country? At Politico, Philip Ewing notes how difficult that strategy may be for President Barack Obama:

Back in the day when it was fashionable for the press to criticize the president and senior military officials for mismanaging a war--that is, from 2003 to 2009--such stories often focused on the colonels, majors, and captains who saw firsthand the practical problems with their superiors' approach…

MSNBC's Joe Scarborough got in a heated debate with colleague Chuck Todd Thursday morning over whether the father of recently released POW Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl should be subject to criticism over his actions. Scarborough criticized the Obama administration for including Bob Bergdahl in a Rose…

A U.S. Army soldier goes missing at night from a remote post on the edge of enemy territory. Depressed and anxious, he has expressed doubts about the U.S. mission and disillusionment with the war. He allegedly leaves behind a note recording these doubts. There are some reports that he consumes…

The Obama administration is facing mounting questions about the controversial prisoner swap that freed Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl from jihadists in Pakistan in exchange for the transfer and ultimate release of five senior Taliban commanders previously held in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. 

Six American soldiers died in their search for Bowe Bergdahl, the Army sergeant freed by the Taliban in exchange for five Taliban detainees at Guantanamo Bay. Time magazine's Mark Thompson provides the names, photos, and stories of the men who did not return from their mission: staff sergeant…

Several men who served with Army sergeant Bowe Bergdahl in Afghanistan say Bergdahl deserted in 2009 before being captured by the Taliban. Bergdahl's release this weekend as part of an exchange with the U.S. for five top Taliban operatives who were being held in Guantanamo Bay has prompted those…

A book event on May 22 for the book Brothers Forver at the American Enterprise Institute, featuring retired Gen. John Allen:

America’s chattering classes seem at last to have awoken to the fact that the U.S. military ain’t what it used to be. Even the New York Times allows that “the Pentagon’s proposals to reduce the Army to pre-World War II levels” could “seem unsettling to a nation that prides itself on having the…

Vladimir Putin is aggressive, increasingly armed, and dangerous. Besides his recent attack against Ukraine, he invaded Georgia in 2008 and has been rearming since well before then.  Like his Communist and czarist predecessors, Putin seeks to expand Moscow’s control.  Russian military spending—for…

The Army’s venerable Reserve Officer Training Corps program is finally getting rebooted.

The partial federal government shutdown is certainly serving to illuminate the stark divide between what everyday Americans care about—being free to visit monuments to American heroes on the National Mall, watching the Air Force-Navy football game—and what the modern Democratic party cares…

Sometimes timing is everything. Yesterday was day one of the federal government shutdown, and one of the biggest stories of the day was the barricading of the World War II memorial in Washington, D.C., nearly preventing a group of 92 veterans from Mississippi who had been flown in on an Honor…

The Defense Department currently operates, as Bob Brewin of Government Executive writes:

In the midst of a fair amount of depressing news from Afghanistan (e.g., al-Qaeda backers get U.S. military contracts, U.S. cites “due process rights” as reason not to cancel), here's a report from the front that offers some grounds for hope.

The Pentagon has been on a long and expensive quest to make its personnel invisible. Or something close to it. So new camouflage patterns have been researched. Several of them, in fact. At least one for every branch of the service, including the Air Force, most of whose people do not need to hide…

Stephen D. Abney, the chief public affairs official for the Army’s Joint Munitions Command, recently sent a message to all 6,000 employees he speaks for: Don’t criticize President Barack Obama or any political party to members of the press. The message was received by civilian contractors as well.

For three years, a private citizen named Steve LeBard has led the effort to build a privately funded memorial in Orcutt, California—a tranquil small town located on the Golden State’s gorgeous Central Coast—to honor military veterans.  And for the better part of those three years, he has run into a…

On Thursday, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta announced that the U.S. military would lift its long-standing ban on women in combat. The national media, as can be expected, is popping the champagne corks in celebration.

The death of Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf recalls a moment in history that now seems far more distant than the actual twenty-one years. The defeat of Saddam Hussein's Iraqi army was absolute and almost flawlessly accomplished in a 100-hour campaign on the ground that followed six weeks of…

It is no surprise Barack Obama’s campaign is running ads to highlight the support of former chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell. After all, for the most part, the military overwhelmingly supports Mitt Romney.

A reader writes in: 

The official Twitter account of the United States Army sent out a message to its more than 186,000 followers recognizing the 47th anniversary of the "first public burning of a draft card." Here's the tweet:

Last year, when elite universities began announcing their intentions to bring back ROTC, Jonathan E. Hillman and I cautioned that if Ivy League ROTC was to succeed, it would require a real commitment from both the schools and the military.

Fred Barnes reviews When Saturday Mattered Most for the Wall Street Journal:

Arkansas Republican House candidate Tom Cotton has released a new ad, highlighting the political lessons Cotton learned serving in the U.S. Army.

Republican congressman Allen West, a freshman from Florida, has a new television ad featuring Robert Delgado, a retired Army sergeant. In the ad, Delgado claims West saved his life when the two men were serving in Iraq. Watch the ad below:

Working to suppress the protesters in Syria, the army there, the New York Times reports, is "gathering confidence":

During the decades of international sanctions against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, successive U.S. administrations yearned for regime change. The hope was that longstanding frustration with international isolation and relative deprivation would inspire some unspecified Baathist general to assassinate…

In Annapolis today, Air Force and Navy met on “the fields of friendly strife.”  With 10:00 left in the game, Air Force led 28-10, having more or less dominated play for the first 50 minutes. With 2:09 left, the Falcons still led 28-17. Then Navy nailed a must-make 37-yard field goal, recovered the…

ABC News reports:

Pfc. Naser Abdo, the soldier arrested yesterday for planning an attack on Fort Hood in Texas, last year requested that he be given conscientious objector status so that he wouldn't  be deployed to fight in Afghanistan. CNN Headline News seemed enthusiastic, at the time, fawning over Abdo's request :

Fox News drops this big revelation following the arrest of Pfc. Naser Jason Abdo, a Muslim soldier at Ft. Hood in Kileen, Texas this morning:

Peter Wallison: "Finally, the True Story of the Financial Crisis Breaks Through"

The university senate at Columbia just passed a resolution, 51-17-1, expressing support for inviting the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps back to campus.

For those of us who have been arguing against cutting the U.S. defense budget and, indeed, arguing instead that it’s too low as is, we’re used to our critics saying that we never have met a defense expenditure we don’t like, that we have no ideas for how defense monies can be better utilized, or…