The nuclear challenges that await the United States are increasingly about quality rather than quantity. As U.S. and Russian arsenals grew smaller and more restrained, others have moved in the opposite direction. North Korea threatens to strike Washington and Seoul.…
To assess local perceptions of drone strikes, I conducted 147 semi-structured interviews with adult (18 years or older) residents of North Waziristan in the summer and winter of 2015. Access to the respondents was made possible by the Pakistani military’s…
In a diary entry on July 25, 1945, Truman wrote that he had asked his secretary of war “to use it so that military objectives and soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children… “The target will…
I am seeking a grand strategic overview of the grand strategic field such as it is, in clear but not simplistic statements susceptible to critical consideration and re-consideration – not total occupation of the literature and victory in detail down to every last sty and hollow. All the same, if I am reluctant to add to the reading list unnecessarily, I will remain grateful for recommendations on further very-essential reading.
While the general, who commanded all U.S. forces from 2008 to 2010, said he supports a unified country, he added the U.S. government needs to consider whether Iraq has already been divided into three sectors by the sectarian violence –…
…highly prescient, from the vantage point of 1943, regarding the American reliance on technological solutions to political and military challenges.
When blog conversation (or “reading the comments”) works well, I think: The discussion under a very short (“Off the Cuff”) post (written on the occasion of some stray Twitter traffic and unrelated technical or “back-end” work) may have produced the…
“Chris” notes that Civil War monuments are much more common in the South than the North. Throughout much of the South, it is impossible to escape The War. It may be objected at this point, by those of you who…
Two “audio letters” home, sent December 19, 1944, one in which Duncan has his friend Joe (“a good singer”) sing “White Christmas,” the other featuring Duncan singing “Oh Holy Night.” The discs themselves are very lightweight, and have not survived…
Responding to Dick Cheney’s infamous performance on Meet the Press, Andrew Sullivan delivers an admission at odds with his thesis of the irredeemable evil of the Bush Administration’s enhanced interrogations program. Sullivan addresses a set of exchanges between Cheney and…
bob@ CK MacLeod:
I was sloppy in my moral/ethical formulation. I agree with your response about the need for actualization up to a point. [...]
First, let me resist the binary that “you’re either for or against Trump,” at least for purposes of this discussion where we’re evaluating more than [...]
"Shared identity" seems to me more a product of primate evolution than that of the "imperial nation state". What's a difference of at least [...]
