Okay, so we only made it through three e-mails last time. I have 61 in my inbox. Fortunately, I don’t have to do all of them — just the oldest and worth saving.
Next up:
An item entitled “Watch ‘Charlie Rose – An hour with General David Petraeus’” I sent myself through Google Reader on 10 SEP [...]

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. [...]

I like McBlogger, but, unfortunately, it’s made itself into one of the many jackasses that have felt it necessary to comment on something it has no knowledge about.
Opinions are one thing. Actually paying close attention and then voicing an opinion is another. Stick to state politics, Mickey B.

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 [...]

First off this morning, I’d like to point you to abu muqawama’s comments on a critique of Gen. Petraeus, our current commander in Iraq, by Andrew Bacevich in The New Republic.
A couple of his comments that I completely agree with (and many of which I’ve posted here about before):

[T]he big problem, as Bacevich sees [...]

Samantha Power, of “A Problem from Hell:” America and the Age of Genocide fame, an insightful book studying America’s indifference to various genocides throughout the 20th Century, had a great book review in last Sunday’s The New York Times.
While I started reading her review just because I respected her and wanted to read her thoughts [...]

I’m going to post select excerpts from this article in today’s The New York Times that I think display the heart of COIN operations and the changes happening in the Sunni-populated areas outside of Baghdad. The article, of course, has some sour notes, but I think the overall conclusion is fairly optimistic.
Capt. Ben Richards had [...]

From The Wall Street Journal:
Defense Secretary Robert Gates and some allies in the Bush administration are seeking to build bipartisan political support for a long-term U.S. presence in Iraq by moving toward withdrawing significant numbers of troops from Iraq by the end of President Bush’s term.
The complicating factor is how long the administration will [...]

The Wall Street Journal (sub. req’d, those mofos) is a bit tardy to the story of Army Lieutenant Colonel Paul Yingling’s blistering critique (“A failure in generalship,” Armed Forces Journal, May 2007) of America’s generals.
I think, and, according to the WSJ article, junior officers concur, his critique is generally true, especially when it focuses on [...]