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History Channel Origin of Taps includes the history of Taps and a look at the Broken Note at John F Kennedy's funeral in 1963

Defense Secretary James Mattis told the US Army it “must stand ready” and have military options “our president can deploy” in case diplomacy fails to solve the standoff with increasingly belligerent North Korea. “There’s one thing the U.S. Army can do, and that is you have got to be ready to ensure that we have military options that our president can employ if needed,” Mattis told the Association of the US Army’s annual meeting in Washington, DC, on Monday, according to The Hill. “But that means the U.S. Army must stand ready, and so, if you’re ready, that’s your duty...

The Department of Defense took over the distribution of hurricane relief from government officials in Puerto Rico this weekend after local mayors failed to appropriately disperse the emergency items to the territory’s 78 municipalities, The Miami Herald reported Sunday. According to The Herald, food, water, and medical supplies were previously delivered to 10 regional staging sites in Puerto Rico, but the mayors did not coordinate properly to distribute the large containers of relief at the staging sites. Instead, 10 to 20 soldiers will be posted in every municipality with vehicles and logistical support, where they will deliver relief to every...

The U.S. military said on Saturday it has opened an investigation into fake mobile phone alerts and social media messages advising U.S. military personnel and their families to evacuate the Korean Peninsula. The phony messages, which were spread on Thursday, came at a sensitive time, with tensions high after North Korea conducted its sixth and largest nuclear test on Sept. 3. The test and a series of missile launches have triggered a war of words between U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un.

Thirty-seven years after the U.S. Air Force shut down a mountain-top radar station in the hills south of San Jose that scanned the skies for Soviet bombers during the Cold War, the summit of Mount Umunhum is finally opening to the public this week as a new park, with stunning views of San Francisco Bay, Silicon Valley and Monterey Bay. The Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District, a public agency that owns the 3,486-foot peak in the Santa Cruz Mountains east of Los Gatos, spent $25 million over eight years on the project. Supporters say the new summit, which visitors will...

The U.S. military on Friday pulled back surveillance aircraft that had been watching an 11-bus ISIS convoy filled with hundreds of militants and their family members -- at the request of the Russian government. The ISIS convoy was given safe passage over 10 days ago to travel from the Lebanon-Syria border across the Syrian desert to the Iraqi border in a deal struck between Syria and Hezbollah, which angered the U.S. military.

WASHINGTON/BEIJING (Reuters) -- U.S. President Donald Trump said on Thursday he would prefer not to use military action against North Korea to counter its nuclear and missile threat but that if he did it would be a "very sad day" for the leadership in Pyongyang. Trump again pointedly declined to rule out a U.S. military response following North Korea's sixth and most powerful nuclear test as his administration seeks increased economic sanctions, saying Pyongyang was "behaving badly and it's got to stop." "Military action would certainly be an option. Is it inevitable? Nothing is inevitable," Trump said during a news...

Secretary of Defense James Mattis issued issued a warning to North Korea on Sunday, saying the country would be hit with a “massive military response” if it continues to threaten the U.S. Mattis mentioned any threats to the U.S. and their allies, including territories such as Guam, would cause the U.S. to respond with strong military action. “Any threat to the United States or its territories including Guam or our allies will be met with a massive military response,” Mattis said outside of the White House after a meeting with President Donald Trump. The defense secretary called out Kim in...

Americans continue to get fatter and it’s delivering a huge blow to the country, both in higher health care costs and undercutting military recruiting, according to a huge new study. The 14th annual State of Obesity: Better Policies for a Healthier America report from the Trust for America’s Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation bluntly reported that 70 percent of the nation is obese or overweight. And while the rate of obesity growth is leveling off, the costs aren’t. The report, for example, said additional health care for obese adults and children is $150 billion a year and billions...

Al-Qaida leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi lost his aura of invincibility in 2006 when the U.S. military released raw outtakes of a captured video showing the terrorist chief to be a befuddled, pudgy bumbler in a black ninja costume who didn’t know how to operate a machine gun.4 But some in the U.S. military didn’t get the value of ripping down al-Zarqawi in this way, arguing that the machine gun, an M249 Squad Automatic Weapon, is “complicated to master” and requires extensive training. Plus, the M249 in question was an “older variant, which makes its malfunctioning unsurprising.”5 Arab journalists, on the...

BALTIMORE (AP) — The American Civil Liberties Union has filed a lawsuit challenging President Donald Trump’s ban on transgender individuals joining the military. The federal lawsuit was filed in Maryland on Monday by the ACLU of Maryland on behalf of several service members who are transgender. Trump directed the Pentagon on Friday to implement the ban on transgender individuals joining the military, which he first announced in a tweet. He also gave to the Pentagon the authority to decide the future of openly transgender people already serving. The lawsuit says Trump’s policy violates the equal protection rights of transgender service...

Trump gives the Pentagon six months to kick THOUSANDS of transgender service people out of the military if they are deemed 'non-deployable'. A month after he announced a ban on transgender people serving in the military via Twitter, Donald Trump has issued a memo on how the decision is to be implemented. The two-and-a-half-page note says Defense Secretary Jim Mattis must consider a service member's 'deployability' when deciding whether to eject them from the military. That means that if they are unable to serve in a war zone, take part in training or serve on a ship for months, they...

Monday night President Trump announced to the Nation the recommitment of America’s will, military, and diplomatic might to the fight in Afghanistan. He signaled to all that this Nation will not back away from hard sacrifice to ensure our safety. Undoubtedly, you will hear the hue and cry from the President’s detractors recalling a need to withdraw from Afghanistan and their rallying cries of failed campaign promises and abandonment of America First. Do not listen to them. Make no mistake, I have been with the President since nearly the beginning, well before he was the Republican Presidential nominee. I wrote...

FULL TITLE: The U.S. Military Will Be Conducting ‘A Major Military Exercise’ On The Korean Peninsula During The Solar Eclipse On August 21st, approximately 25,000 U.S. troops will join “tens of thousands” from the South Korean military to conduct a “major military exercise” that is already triggering threats from North Korea. Considering the fact that any sort of provocation could cause a nuclear war to erupt on the Korean peninsula, is this really a wise thing to do? The more research that I do on this upcoming solar eclipse, the stranger things become. When I first started hearing about this...

Top US military officer warns NKorea that US military ready SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — The top U.S. military officer said Monday that the United States wants to peacefully resolve a deepening standoff with North Korea but is also ready to use the “full range” of its military capabilities in case of provocation. The comments by Marine Corps Gen. Joseph Dunford in a series of meetings with senior South Korean military and political officials and the local media appeared to be an attempt to ease anxiety over tit-for-tat threats between President Donald Trump and North Korea while also showing a...

U.S. military strategists at the Pentagon have a military solution in place to address the growing threat emanating from North Korea, but they are holding their fire in favor of ongoing diplomatic efforts by Washington and its allies, Defense Secretary James Mattis said Thursday. The Pentagon chief remained largely mum on the details of that military solution, which theoretically would curb Pyongyang’s efforts to develop a nuclear-capable, ballistic missile arsenal, except to say any military option would be a multilateral one involving a number of regional powers in the Pacific. “Do I have military options? Of course, I do. That’s...

In 2013, the US military lifted its ban on women serving in combat. Shortly after, the Marine Corps began what it calls an “unprecedented research effort” to understand the impact of gender integration on its combat forces. That took the form of a year-long experiment called the Ground Combat Element Integrated Task Force, in which 400 Marines — 100 of them female — trained for combat together and then undertook a simulated deployment, with every aspect of their experience measured and scrutinized. All branches of the military faced a January 1, 2016 deadline to open all combat roles to women,...

Coast Guard officials reached out personally to their transgender service members to express support after President Trump’s announcement of a new policy barring transgender people in the military, according to Commandant Adm. Paul Zukunft. “The first thing we did is we reached out to all 13 members of the Coast Guard who have come out” as transgender, Zukunft told attendees at a Center for Strategic and International Studies event in Washington. Zukunft said he contacted Lt. Taylor Miller, the Coast Guard’s first openly transitioning officer who was featured in a Washington Post article last week. “If you read that story,...

More than a dozen retired generals and admirals have signed a letter to President Trump thanking him for his announced policy to ban transgender people from the armed forces. “We write today to express our gratitude to you for making the extremely courageous decision to reverse President [Barack] Obama’s transgender social experiment,” the conservative retired flag officers wrote. “There may be an enormous amount of vitriol directed at you for making this policy correction, but please know that overturning this policy may have done more in the long-term to save the culture and war-fighting capacity of the U.S. military than...

The Air Force is accelerating development of a special, high-tech, on-board threat library for the F-35 designed to precisely identify enemy aircraft operating in different high-risk areas around the globe - such as a Chinese J-20 stealth fighter or Russian T-50 PAK FA 5th Gen fighter, service leaders said. Described as the brains of the airplane, the "mission data files" are extensive on-board data systems compiling information on geography, air space and potential threats in areas where the F-35 might be expected to perform combat operations, Air Force officials explained. "Mission data files are the key that unlocks the F-35,"...