Pirate Petri Dish

Josh Marshall, no military guru he, is nonetheless onto something as he looks briefly at the piracy situation:
Historically, the rising incidence of piracy has frequently, if not always, been a sign of the receding reach of whatever great power has taken on responsibility for policing the sea lanes. The decline of the Hellenistic monarchies in [...]

Brainwashed

American Prospect offers a look at the development of counterinsurgency doctrine. Some of the analysis is highly debatable. One particularly interesting tidbit is that defense guru Edward Luttwak favors junking the Afghan war for reasons and in favor of a strategy I agree with:
“What the fuck are we doing there?” he asks. “Much better to [...]

“Not Recommended”

Former Space Shuttle program manager Wayne Hale discusses the problems involved in aborting short of orbit the flight of any crewed spacecraft. Suffice to say, the problem is a lot more complicated than a lot of armchair astronauts think. Most scenarios involve meat waffles or crispy critters. 
Hale frequently shares spaceflight war stories at his blog, [...]

Old News

USA Today writer John Diamond is out with a book, “The CIA and the Culture of Failure,” that purportedly documents serial failures of tradecraft in the agency and a long-term politicization of its product. Folks like Jeff Stein at CQ are inclined to see this as new:

Diamond, who written about the CIA for the Associated [...]

Buffalo’s Hidden History

Given that a lot of peeps in my family still live in Buffalo, I try somewhat to keep up on what’s happening back there. Needless to say, the town has obviously fallen on hard time. The NYT, however, had an excellent piece in Friday’s paper about how some folks are trying to preserve some of [...]

Intellectual Prerequisite

Galrahn has a mandatory reading list:
if you read this blog and have not read Ian Toll’s book Six Frigates, it is basically a party foul in the context of spilling your red wine on your boss at the Christmas party.
I wouldn’t go quite far, but Toll’s work is excellent particularly for his examination of the economic [...]

The Vision Thing

NASA Administration Mike Griffin teaches a little history:
The planned Apollo 20 mission was cancelled a few weeks after the Apollo 11 landing, and Apollo 18 and 19 were cancelled some months later. With those actions, the space program as we knew it in the 1960s was over, finished, and done. NASA is often blamed for [...]

Tough Guys

This quote, a dissenting view from Jeffrey Goldberg’s lengthy piece on McCain’s views on preemption, stood out because it called to mind a friend’s observation that the Vietnamese are the only battlefield enemy we’ve faced that didn’t crumble under the weight of B-52 strikes:
“We lost in Vietnam because we got beat,” Andrew J. Bacevich, an international-relations [...]

Faulty Memory

Bill Whittle admits being a little hazy on McCain family history:
I knew McCain’s father and grandfather were admirals. I did not know his grandfather was on the USS Missouri, came home, and died the next day after giving everything he had for his country. That’s powerful.
Uh huh. I bet he also didn’t know that the senator’s grandfather helped [...]

Executive Presidents

Lisa at Ramblings of a Pseudo-Intellectual is going through the list of the country’s presidents and trying to judge whether their particular background, experience-wise, contributed to superior performance in office. So far she’s through Fillmore. Her most controversial judgment so far would have to be her conclusion that Andrew Jackson was not a good president. [...]