Libya’s newest fun park: Find the scorpion in the F-15 wreckage A US F15E Strike Eagle went down over Libya today. Supposedly “equipment malfunction” brought it down. Also supposedly, both pilots are back in US hands. One was picked up…
Posted on: March 22nd, 2011 | Comments (54)
“I intend to fight it out on this line, if it takes all summer.” U. S. Grant at Spotsylvania Court House *** I’m switching tactics today. No more of those cumbersome massed offensives, meaning columns four or five thousand words…
Posted on: March 21st, 2011 | Comments (41)
There’ve been a few interesting assassinations recently. Not around here, unfortunately. Definitely not the one in Tucson. The dork empties a huge magazine into a crowd, kills nine people including a little girl, and doesn’t even kill the congresswoman he…
Posted on: February 17th, 2011 | Comments (93)
Want to see how we lose men in Afghanistan? Are you sure? Well, if you really want to, you can, thanks to this clip from French TV (scroll down to view it ). I warn you though, it’s pretty nasty stuff.
Posted on: February 10th, 2011 | Comments (92)
While we wait for Egypt to finish cooking, there’s some great footage to watch. It may not be warfare as practiced by Lee and Grant, but it’s weirdly close to what urban combat must have been like before firearms. If…
Posted on: February 2nd, 2011 | Comments (75)
“You know, win or lose, I gotta say I love my day job”: The Pashtun positive work ethic I’ve been watching the news out of Afg—I like it spelled that way, “Afg”; kinda gets the spirit of the thing. The…
Posted on: December 30th, 2010 | Comments (92)
This article was first published by AlterNet. If you didn’t know better, you’d get all excited reading about the Army’s new shoulder-fired cannon, the XM-25. It’s being hyped as a “game-changing” weapon that will literally blow the Taliban out of…
Posted on: December 20th, 2010 | Comments (68)
Listen to the Radio War Nerd podcast [subscribe here] with guest Gunnar Hrafn Jonsson of Iceland Public Radio on the massacre in Orlando and how online Islamic State jihadis are dealing with battlefield defeats and the shrinking caliphate. Subscribe to Radio War Nerd through the show’s Patreon page.
Photographic evidence of Tibet’s military, circa 1950 FRESNO, CA — Writing a column on the military history of Tibet seemed like a good idea in the good old days, a week ago, before I started actually trying to research it….
It was a week for do-it-yourselfers in the war world. A little lesson for us all, that you don’t need a lot of hardware to make war. All you need is the old standbys: hunting rifles, blasting caps, and trucks…
Let’s see how well you know your military history. Give the date and place of this comminique: “Our Victorious Forces Liberate Zalambessa!! Our victorious and heroic air and ground forces have liberated the town of Zalambessa after completely annihilating the…
They asked me to think about how war would change over the next 150 years for the eXile’s anniversary issue. Weird to think about it: wars going on when you’re dead. My doctor told me it’s maybe 15 more years…
Last column I asked readers to suggest wars that’d be more fun for the US to get involved in than Colombia. I got some great answers — and thanks everybody who wrote in — but when I looked into the…
Every day America gets deeper into the shit in Colombia. We’re dumping planeloads of cash on the Colombian army — $1.5 billion is what Rumsfeld’ll admit, so you gotta assume it’s more like ten billion with the rest squeezed through…
This year’s Oscar for best military comedy has to go to the island-claiming “war” between those great military powers, Spain and Morocco. It was a sidesplitter from beginning to end. Just imagine the battle of Iwo Jima turned into a…
