Outside the Beltway

Fighting a cult of personality is exhausting.

It’s . . . complicated.

Playing two-level games.

Many and small beats large and heavy. Finding beats flanking. Swarming beats surging.

Pundits like Thomas Friedman struggle with premature prognostication.

I guess you proved your point about great powers picking and choosing their battlefields.

The postmortems are well underway.

My latest for Defense One.

The founder of Small Wars Journal passed Saturday.

A new report details the extent to which the eighteen-year Afghanistan War has been marked by mistakes, and lies by the government to cover-up the fact that we went to war without a clear understanding of what we were doing.

Patrick Shanahan, who has been serving as Acting Defense Secretary since James Mattis left in December, is being selected to replace Mattis in that position.

The U.S. military will no longer release reports regarding the success, or failure, of the current strategy in Afghanistan.

The legendary figure was in charge of strategic forecasting at the Pentagon for decades.

President Trump has actually made a good pick for National Security Adviser. As with the rest of his foreign policy team, though, the question is if he’ll listen to him.

A respected scholar has an interesting suggestion for fighting the Forever War.

My latest for War on The Rocks, “The Inter-Service Wars Are Looking Like Calvinball,” has posted.

ISIS has captured Ramadi, and revealed yet again how fractured Iraq actually is. Fixing that isn’t something that American aid or arms can accomplish.

The most widely honored General from the Iraq and Afghanistan War has plead guilty to sharing classified information with his mistress.

My latest for The National Interest, “Hagel’s Defense Cuts: The Least Bad Choice,” is out.

A rather impressive recovery from a career that was mostly dead in 2007.

My review of Andrew Bacevich’s latest book, Breach of Trust: How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country.

f Assad is eating Cheerios, we’re going to take away his spoon and give him a fork.

West Point graduates account for nearly one in fifty deaths in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

General Petreaus is now Dr. Petraeus and will be teaching a 1-1 load a the City University of New York.

Tim Kane continues his campaign against the US military’s antiquated personnel system.

Greg Jaffe has an outstanding feature titled “In one Army family, women in combat evokes two different perspectives.”

The scandal now surrounding David Petraeus should lead people to reassess his past record.

The scandal that led to P4’s downfall has many layers, none of them flattering to the most famous American general of his generation.

John Nagl, who became famous as a leading counterinsurgency theorist and practitioner, is taking on a new challenge: grooming young boys for life.

A former Obama official says government should learn from business, but is private industry really more efficient?

US Army Special Forces are the best we have at working with far-flung villagers. Are they good enough?

For the first time in 68 years, neither major party candidate for President has served in the military. Does this matter?

My first piece for The New Republic, “Why the Obama Administration’s Drone War May Soon Reach a Tipping Point,” is up.

The military promotion system does not reward top performers rapidly enough.

Michael Hastings has yet another credulous story attempting to smear the United States military.

For years, analysts have worried that Iraq’s tenuous hold on stability would collapse upon the withdrawal of US forces. We’re now watching it happen.

Mike Flynn, the 2-star who blasted military intelligence, is now the 3-star charged with fixing military intelligence.

Honoring the fallen by ensuring that the didn’t die in vain is a recipe for getting more good men killed.

Last night, the President basically announced that America’s longest war had entered it’s end game.

Technology has saved the lives of countless American soldiers. But it’s made going to war easier.

Most good government jobs require a college degree–but they don’t care much whether it’s a real one.

America’s war colleges have some problems but we can’t close them.

President Obama says he acted in Libya to avert an imminent genocide, but there’s no evidence that any such thing was about to occur.

Nine years into a war that seems to be without end, it’s time to declare victory and go home.

Stephanie Guttman, author of something called The Kinder, Gentler Military, takes to NRO to tell us how easy it is to cut the Defense budget. She inadvertently does just the opposite.