The Trillion-Dollar Military Budget
WIB politics July 26, 2017
You wouldn’t know it, based on the endless cries for more money coming from the military, politicians and the president, but these are the best of times for the Pentagon. Spending on the Department of Defense alone is already well in excess of half a trillion dollars a year... Read more
Will Donald Trump Privatize the Afghanistan War?
WIB politics July 26, 2017
Is the Trump administration going to hand over U.S. peacekeeping operations in Afghanistan to private mercenaries? This is now the big question in national security policy circles. It follows last week’s The New York Times report that Erik Prince, the founder of private security firm Blackwater, and Stephen Feinberg, the... Read more
The Netflix movie War Machine paints counterinsurgency wars as impossible. All of them. “The thing about counterinsurgency is that it doesn’t really work,” the film’s narrator says. “We tried it in Vietnam. That went well. The British and the French gave it a shot, trying to hang on to... Read more
On a sunny day in October, 33-year-old Anthony Garrett walked to the 10th floor of the 1157 N. Cleveland building in Chicago’s Cabrini Green housing complex. He knew that his fellow Cobras gang members hid an AR-15 assault rifle there. Just before 9:00 A.M., Garrett opened the bathroom window... Read more
In his June 2017 article “Against An Air Force Space Corps: Space Belongs to the Navy!”, Matt Hipple made an astute observation about the future of military space operations. Visions of future sustained operations in space do indeed resemble classic naval operations at sea. Virtually every single work of... Read more
How Internet Trolls Became Terrorists
WIB politics July 24, 2017
In early July 2017, Eric Ciaramella quit his job on the National Security Council. Ciaramella was National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster’s assistant and, because of that position, online trolls made his life very hard. Popular alt-right media personality Michael Cernovich published a hit piece about Ciarmella alleging, among other... Read more
The World’s Most Dangerous Flashpoint
WIB politics July 22, 2017
With the world’s attention firmly fixated on North Korea, the greatest possibility of nuclear war is in fact on the other side of Asia. That place is what could be called the nuclear triangle of Pakistan, India and China. Although Chinese and Indian forces are currently engaged in a standoff, traditionally the most... Read more
Precision Warfare? Don’t Make Me Laugh
WIB politics July 21, 2017
You remember. It was supposed to be 21st-century war, American-style — precise beyond imagining; smart bombs; drones capable of taking out a carefully identified and tracked human being just about anywhere on earth; special operations raids so pinpoint-accurate that they would represent a triumph of modern military science. Everything... Read more
In the next few weeks Congress will debate and approve legislation to authorize and appropriate over $1 trillion in national security spending. That debate should include authorization for our current wars. But yet again leadership proved its cowardice when it comes to its constitutional responsibility to declare wars, and... Read more
ISIS Is Deploying More Women Suicide Bombers
WIB politics July 19, 2017
ISIS is losing ground. And as the group retreats, it’s sending women through the front lines to blow themselves up among enemy soldiers and civilians. In July 2017, an Iraqi news network captured on video a female suicide bomber holding a baby moments before detonating her explosives in Mosul,... Read more