Yesterday, US President Obama signed a $680bn military policy bill, which cuts military spending, including $2bn in funding for new F-22 fighter jets. However, the bill also contained the first major piece of federal gay rights legislation, and fulfilled an Obama campaign promise: acts of violence against gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people have now been added to the list of federal hate crimes.
posted by zarq on Oct 29, 2009 - 219 comments

A Gay Soldier's Husband — In the backdrop of the conservative activist Supreme Court's recent decision against hearing a challenge to the US military's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy, one gay American relates the difficulties he faces having a partner on active duty in Iraq. In Iraq itself, death squads continue to murder gay and lesbian Iraqis, while American occupying forces look the other way.
posted by Blazecock Pileon on Jun 10, 2009 - 73 comments

How to blog, or counter-blog, for the US Air force, in handy flow chart form.
posted by Artw on Jan 6, 2009 - 40 comments

Team Lioness is the name given to a group of female soliders, (and the documentary about them) who were some of the first women in modern American warfare to engage in frontline combat — something that is officially forbidden by the military. "The female support soliders were assigned to the 1st Engineer Battalion and they were recruited to accompany Marine units during raids. Originally, the female soldiers were there to search and detain any women they came upon and to guard the unit's Arabic interpreter. Over time, however, as the situation in Ramadi deteriorated, the Marine units transitioned into a more offensive role, baiting insurgents into firefights in order to draw them out. Until officers higher up the chain got spooked over the possibility of a female soldier killed in combat and quietly disbanded the unit, members of Team Lioness were often right in the thick of things, including some of the fiercest urban firefights of the Iraq War."
posted by nooneyouknow on Nov 14, 2008 - 22 comments

Need money? Have a blog? Well, your troubles may be over: "Hiring a block of bloggers to verbally attack a specific person or promote a specific message may be worth considering." Of course, if you don't want to play along, there are other ways to make your blog useful:

Hacking the site and subtly changing the messages and data—merely a few words or phrases—may be sufficient to begin destroying the blogger’s credibility with the audience.... If the messages are subtly tweaked and the data corrupted in the right way, the enemy may reason that the blogger in question has betrayed them and... take down the site (and the blogger) themselves....

Who might you be interested in "clandestinely recruiting or hiring prominent bloggers"? Oh, the US military.
posted by orthogonality on Apr 5, 2008 - 20 comments

"Of 10 governments worldwide implicated in the recruitment or use of children as soldiers, nine receive US military assistance."
posted by chunking express on Apr 27, 2007 - 24 comments

Britain may pull out of the JSF program. Multinational defense programmes are becoming more common, and the JSF is indicative of particularly close ties between the U.K. and the U.S. Representatives Hyde and Hunter have opposed the transfer of technology to Britain. Even with the Rueda Report (pdf) concluding that the embargo against China not be lifted, eventual third-party sales to China still appear a concern.
posted by Captaintripps on Dec 6, 2005 - 16 comments

The argument I make in my book is that what I describe as the new American militarism arises as an unintended consequence of the reaction to the Vietnam War and more broadly, to the sixties... If some people think that the sixties constituted a revolution, that revolution produced a counterrevolution, launched by a variety of groups that had one thing in common: they saw revival of American military power, institutions, and values as the antidote to everything that in their minds had gone wrong. None of these groups — the neoconservatives, large numbers of Protestant evangelicals, politicians like Ronald Reagan, the so-called defense intellectuals, and the officer corps — set out saying, “Militarism is a good idea.” But I argue that this is what we’ve ended up with: a sense of what military power can do, a sort of deference to the military, and an attribution of virtue to the men and women who serve in uniform. Together this constitutes such a pernicious and distorted attitude toward military affairs that it qualifies as militarism.
An interview with Andrew Bacevich, international relations professor and former Army colonel, and author of The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War--and here is a review. Recently by Bacevich: We Aren't Fighting to Win Anymore - U.S. troops in Iraq are only trying to buy time.
posted by y2karl on Feb 21, 2005 - 37 comments

Over a thousand U.S. soldiers have died in the War on Terror. As of today, 872 soldiers have died in Operation Iraqi Freedom and 129 in Operation Enduring Freedom. Time for a moment of silence, perhaps, before sharing your reflections on the subject.
posted by insomnia_lj on Jul 7, 2004 - 51 comments

In the can-anything-else-go-wrong file, US Troops suffer from permanent brain damage after being administered malaria treatment. For as big a logistical challenge a war might be, and technological advances in mass support systems, you'd think the joint-forces would do a better job?
posted by omidius on May 27, 2004 - 11 comments

Protecting the Cradle Kirkuk Air Base -- US Army Colonel works with Iraqi archaeological officials to protect nearby ancient sites.

Meanwhile at more secluded mounds, looters continue to plunder the sites and to erase the tangible record of the world's earliest civilizations. "When you come here at night, it looks like a city, there are so many lights," [Archaeological official Abdul-Amir] Hamdani said, looking out over the arid scrubland where thieves swarm after dark.
posted by mcgraw on May 25, 2004 - 6 comments

The Wrong Morons. (from the Army Times) "Around the halls of the Pentagon, a term of caustic derision has emerged for the enlisted soldiers at the heart of the furor over the Abu Ghraib prison scandal: the six morons who lost the war...But the folks in the Pentagon are talking about the wrong morons."
posted by Ty Webb on May 11, 2004 - 23 comments

United States Military Operations. Quite a few.
posted by four panels on Oct 25, 2002 - 18 comments

U.S. forces head to Ivory Coast - with all the debate for/against military action in the middle-east, I'm pleased to see US forces being deployed to protect innocent people. "Their first task may be to retrieve about 100 American children who have been trapped at a school in the city of Bouake for five days and to protect Americans in three or four Ivory Coast towns held by rebels. "
posted by Stuart_R on Sep 24, 2002 - 28 comments

US demands information on long forgotten downed pilot while insisting they not release the names or allow legal counsel to "enemy combatants" held within the US?
posted by specialk420 on Aug 23, 2002 - 15 comments

The G-Rated War: Blowing Smoke, Pipe Dream, or The Real Hashish?
I want to spin antiwar arguments a slightly different way. Previous threads have been quite dim. This Cnn chat transcript focuses on the use of non-lethal weapons, the need to separate innocents from terrorists and separate terrorist networks from Islamic states, and the interviewee is as much as suit as they come. You could cut a diamond on that crew cut. I have several questions: 1) Is the US military actually going to use non-lethal weapons, or is this the new "smart bomb?" 2) Do the 'pacificists' among us consider this to be pacificist? 3) If you do favor peace over war, do you think this is a good compromise between peace and war, or is the issue by definition binary? More > >
posted by rschram on Oct 3, 2001 - 11 comments