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Secretary Gates was in Kansas yesterday, giving the latest installment of the Landon Lectures at Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kansas. < snip > I find the Washington Post's headline interesting... Gates Urges Increased Funding for Diplomacy, with the tagline of Secretary Calls for Use of 'Soft Power'. I watched the address live. My take, like my notes, are a little different. This speech is potentially a historic address, if Secretary Gates can put in motion a plan that the next administration will be able to carry forward. He's couching it in terms that a Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton...

The coalition of the enemies of freedom has growing power around the world. Its leaders are increasingly bold in hostility to the United States. America is faced with two hard paths in Iraq. We can accept defeat and try to rebuild our position in the region while accommodating these enemies of freedom in Iraq -- sadistic inflictors of atrocities will have defeated both millions of Iraqis who voted self government and the American people who supported them. (or)we can insist on defeating our enemies and the enemies of the Iraqi people by developing strategies and implementing mechanisms necessary to force...

WASHINGTON, May 17, 2006 – The top U.S. general urged Congress today to help convey the nobility of military service to America's youth and to encourage a full, interagency response to the global war on terror. Marine Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a Senate defense subcommittee today that the "armed forces clearly are ready and fully resources to conduct all the missions that this nation expects of us." Photo by Petty Officer 1st Class Chad McNeeley, USN  (Click photo for screen-resolution image);high-resolution image available. The U.S. military is not just an all-volunteer force, but...

Firefighting pilots in Western Colorado have a new facility. The new Grand Junction Interagency Air Center will be dedicated Tuesday at Walker Field Airport. The 92-hundred-square-foot facility serves as headquarters for heavy air tankers, pilots, smokejumpers, dispatchers and administrators. The air center serves as a base for fighting fires in parts of Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, South Dakota, New Mexico and Arizona. It has six full-time employees and 30 seasonal workers. Last year the center responded to about two-thousand incidents.

WASHINGTON, April 5, 2006 – Improving cooperation and coordination among government agencies is vital to winning the global war on terrorism and ending circumstances that drive people to terrorism, top Defense Department officials said on Capitol Hill yesterday. "We must bring all elements of our national power to bear in this struggle against global terrorism, and we can only do that through effective interagency coordination at all levels," Thomas W. O'Connell, DoD's assistant secretary for special operations and low-intensity conflict, told members of the House Armed Services Committee. The most recent Quadrennial Defense Review states the Long War is "characterized...