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By early 1968, the United States military was involved in an escalating ground and air war in Vietnam. American aircraft were being shot down at the rate of nearly one a day, and Operation Rolling Thunder, the bombing of North Vietnam, was in full swing as B-52s unloaded racks of bombs over the jungle. The US Air Force was engaged in a constant battle against Vietnamese SA-2 surface to air missiles (SAMs), jamming them and spoofing them, electrons dueling invisibly in the air. American airmen with the job of physically destroying the missiles, going by the name Wild Weasels, went...

This month's "In-Depth" on C-Span2 featuring Sebastian Junger is scheduled for repeat tonight at 1:00 AM EDT. Junger wrote the original journalistic version which was adapted into the movie "The Perfect Storm" and has produced several award-winning documentaries including "Restrepo", about his time embedded with our troops fighting in Afghanistan. His latest book is "Tribe", dealing broadly with his theories about people's need to belong to groups for meaning and purpose, and more specifically with his interest in war and how, although it is a dangerous and frightening experience, those involved in fighting actually value the experience and can come...

IN the summer of 1916, a young Oxford academic embarked for France as a second lieutenant in the British Expeditionary Force. The Great War, as World War I was known, was only half-done, but already its industrial carnage had no parallel in European history. “Junior officers were being killed off, a dozen a minute,” recalled J. R. R. Tolkien. “Parting from my wife,” he wrote, doubting that he would survive the trenches, “was like a death.”

1. In WWII a number of soldiers died of well, farts. When ascending in an unpressurized plane to 20,000 feet, it causes intestinal gas to expand 300%. I guess some guys couldn't fart quickly enough. They should have brought pigs along with them. Then when Porkie was ready to blow, fly over the enemy's plane and drop him. When Porkie goes Blammo you blow the enemy to hell!! Even if you miss, it's okay. The explosion and fire fries up Porko Boy nice and crispy and countryside below rains down bacon, so the starving countryside gets fed. Yay! 2. Speaking...

“Trump has rejected the whole gamut of U.S. imperial war rationales, from FDR straight through to the present.” If the Bernie Sanders campaign has propelled the word “socialism” – if not its actual meaning – into common, benign American usage, Donald Trump may have done the world an even greater service, by calling into question the very pillars of U.S. imperial policy: the NATO alliance; the U.S. nuclear “umbrella”; the global network of 1,000 U.S. bases; military “containment” of China and Russia; and U.S. “strategic” claims in the Persian Gulf. Were the U.S. to actually rid itself of these strategic...

Let’s admit it. As political provocateur, Donald Trump has a dizzy kind of genius. He feints to the right, then he spins to the left. Either way, the hot subject for political chatter becomes Donald Trump. This week, while people everywhere were fretting over his violent talk, the candidate came to Washington and dropped a peace bomb on the neocon editorial writers at The Washington Post and the war lobby. Trump wants to get the United States out of fighting other people’s wars. He thinks maybe NATO has outlived its usefulness. He asks why Americans are still paying for South...

Until recently the progressive mind has been resolutely closed and stubbornly frozen in place against all things Trump. But cracks are appearing in the ice. With increasing frequency over the last few months, some of the most thoughtful left and progressive figures have begun to speak favorably of aspects of Trump’s foreign policy. Let us hear from these heretics, among them William Greider, Glen Ford, John Pilger, Jean Bricmont, Stephen F. Cohen and William Blum. Their words are not to be construed as “endorsements,” but rather an acknowledgment of Trump’s anti-interventionist views, the impact those views are having and the...

<p>MISSOULA, Mont. (AP) — One of the last two surviving members of the Doolittle Raiders — who bombed Japan in an attack that stunned that nation and boosted U.S. morale — has died in Montana, his family said.</p> <p>Retired Staff Sgt. David Jonathan Thatcher died Wednesday in a Missoula hospital. He was 94. He suffered a stroke on Sunday, Thatcher's son Jeff told the Missoulian newspaper (http://bit.ly/28V8l2c).</p>

We’re going to war — either hybrid in nature to break the Russian state back to its 1990s subordination, or a hot war (which will destroy our country). Our citizens should know this, but they don’t because our media is dumbed down in its “Pravda”-like support for our “respectable,” highly aggressive government. We are being led, as C. Wright Mills said in the 1950s, by a government full of “crackpot realists: in the name of realism they’ve constructed a paranoid reality all their own.” Our media has credited Hillary Clinton with wonderful foreign policy experience, unlike Trump, without really noting...

Bottom line and hard fact is that we are now in the middle of a rapidly heating, spiritual battle A couple of weeks ago a woman working at a sandwich shop on the West Coast was venerated by a local TV station for refusing to do business with some guy who hurled anti-Islamic criticism at a couple of girl patrons wearing hijabs. In the shop’s video, you can hear his disparaging remarks regarding the bad things Islam is bringing upon America. The crusading employee who expelled the name-caller was proud and bubbly as she detailed her defense of the two...

Sarah SicardJune 16, 2016 Since the A-10 Warthog, recently seemingly destined for the scrap yard, is now engaging enemy Islamic State fighters in Iraq and Taliban forces in Afghanistan in the form of a new weapon with a badass name - the Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System. Manufactured by BAE Systems, the APKWS is equipped with laser-guided rockets, giving A-10 aircraft in Afghanistan a "deep magazine of high-precision weapons," according to Popular Mechanics. One of the biggest advantages to using this system is the minimal collateral damage left when fired, which is a result of its tiny warhead. In addition,...

Speaking after “appreciating the congrats” on the Orlando shootings, Donald Trump again insisted that what mowed people down at Pulse was not an assault rifle but radical Islam, because in Trump Tower, it cannot be both. Trump’s world is binary. It is zero-sum: Either guns kill people or radical Islam kills people. In that world, only one religion can be bad, and so Christianity is good and Islam is bad. Christianity is peaceful and Islam violent. Christianity is tolerant and Islam intolerant. Both are inherently one thing or the other, immutable blueprints etched in stone for the behavior of their...

In the latest and perhaps decisive battle over the role of women in the military, Congress is embroiled in an increasingly intense debate over whether they should have to register for the draft when they turn 18. On Tuesday, the Senate approved an expansive military policy bill that would for the first time require young women to register for the draft. The shift, while fiercely opposed by some conservative lawmakers and interest groups, had surprisingly broad support among Republican leaders and women in both parties. The United States has not used the draft since 1973 during the Vietnam War. But...

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.—George Santayana (1863-1952) Question: What do all the following statements have in common? Charles “The Hammer” Martel defeated the Moors as they advanced toward Paris in 732 AD.

What does it say about our country that following yet another terrorist attack that the collective response by our “leaders” is to not only condemn an inanimate object but to go further than that and blame Americans for our Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms? What took place in Orlando, Florida wasn’t because of a gun, nor was it because of the make of the gun or the caliber of the rounds or the size of the clips. No, what took place in Orlando happened because of the ideology that pulled the trigger. The ideology sought the weapon,...

Ever since Donald Trump effectively won the Republican presidential nomination by decisively defeating Ted Cruz in the Indiana primary, Congressional Republicans led by House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell have engaged in unseemly public hand-wringing about whether they will or will not accept the people's choice. Unwilling to support the positions that Trump campaigned on -- reducing immigration, adopting a pro-American trade policy, and returning education to the local level -- Speaker Ryan dusted off his own policy agenda and promised to roll out a series of position papers to compete with those of the presumptive...

Illegal aliens here in the United States would leave in huge numbers were the United States attacked by a foreign force. From personal conversations, it is evident that the Mexican, Central American, Caribbean and South American contingent would look for the first plane, train or bus out of town were such to happen. Moms have clearly stated they would take their children and leave. More than likely, Indians, Pakistanis, Middle Easterners, etc. would also flee. Those who have been living here off of the goodwill of the American people would turn and run in the event of armed conflict. This...

A 91-year-old man lifts off in a commercial airliner bound for France and for a moment can imagine himself in the cabin of a Douglas C-47, preparing to leap into moonlit darkness. Norwood Thomas was just a boy, really, the first time he arrived in Normandy. Now he is returning for the last time, once again mindful of his own mortality. More than 100,000 Americans were there at the start of the campaign to retake Europe from Hitler. Only a few hundred are expected to return this week. Thousands more, many too frail to travel, will mark the 70th anniversary...

Stop your average American on the street and ask them “what happened on June 6?” Surprisingly—a few might recall that on a dreary morning while the low-tide lapped lazily on the rocky coast of Normandy, France, brave men in battle armor no thicker than a khaki shirt grimly headed toward Hitler’s Atlantic wall. There is nothing special to mark the 72nd anniversary of the D-Day invasion during World War II. Nothing special—other than the men themselves. That 18-year-old struggling up the steep bluffs of Omaha Beach while tracer rounds flashed overhead would be 90 years old now, eyes flickering still...

Why isn't Obama apologizing to the Germans for WWII?