Interesting article in April’s Armed Forces Journal.
Lt. Col. Edith A Disler, an associate professor of English and deputy head of the Department of English at the Air Force Academy, argues that the Air Force is attempting to reassert its masculinity through language.
Essentially, she argues that two prominent, rather recent linguistic changes or additions have […]

I think this is great.
Army Gen. David Petraeus, the four-star general who led troops in Iraq for the past year, will be nominated by President Bush to be the next commander of U.S. Central Command, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Wednesday.
Gates said he expected Petraeus to make the shift in late summer or early fall. […]

In a Washington Post story today about how Senator Hillary Clinton tends to “veer to the dark side” in her speeches, she is quoted as retelling the story of a military spouse who lost her husband in Iraq:
In another story, retold recently in Youngstown, Ohio, she describes a “young woman who lost her husband in […]

I like this comment made in a blog post about the recently released National Intelligence Estimate deflating the Bush administration’s rhetoric advocating bombing Iran:
It reminds me of that quote from Kurt von Hammerstein:
I divide officers into four classes — the clever, the lazy, the stupid and the industrious. Each officer possesses at least two of […]

Religious right wingnuts American Family Association are attempting to get the military to stop selling Playboy and Penthouse wherever fine reading material is sold on bases.
By law, most skin mags can’t be sold in military stores. Playboy and Penthouse aren’t deemed scandalous enough to fall under those regulations, though.
When I was in Air Force technical […]

But I didn’t get this till today:

Whereas President Harry S. Truman signed the National Security Act of 1947 on July 26, 1947, to realign and reorganize the Armed Forces and to create a separate Department of the Air… (Engrossed as Agreed to or Passed by House)
HCON 207 EH
110th CONGRESS
1st Session
H. CON. RES. 207

[…]

I completely agree with Abu Muqawama:
Abu Muqawama has always been a big fan of the late French intellectual Raymond Aron. Aron, writing in his newspaper column for Le Figaro, believed it was the responsibility of the public intellectual to make a careful study of the issues at hand — economics, military strategy, etc. — before […]

Great article from The Australian about David Kilcullen, an expert in counterinsurgency and adviser to General Petraeus in Iraq:
. . . [W]hen the invasion of Iraq was being planned, Kilcullen was one of a handful of senior military advisers in the coalition of the willing to voice a dissenting view. “I was one of a […]

My little brother just sent over these pictures he took of the POW/MIA Memorial at Hanscom Air Force Base, Massachusetts.
Lest we forget . . .

Talk of a draft has come and gone — probably largely thanks to Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY), who keeps introducing legislation that would establish conscription for 18-year olds — since the beginning of the Iraq war. I’ve never taken it seriously, and still don’t. But it does become a little more interesting when some official […]