You can’t keep a good Talib down. Or in jail, apparently.

Last Sunday I was grumbling about how there are so many great books about war and not that many great war movies. That got a lot of readers lobbing in their suggestions for good war movies. One reminded me that…

Today’s Civil War Caturday (by the way, that’s pronounced “Kivil War Katurday”), right in the middle of Easter. Got me thinking about my religion, if I have one now, and I realized I do, kind of: The Monitor and the…

Seems like I ought to do something religious today, so I picked a battle from the the ultimate military expression of religious devotion: The Thirty Years War (1618-1648), Europe’s way of debating the Catholic vs. Protestant thing by counting corpses.

Somebody with a face finally died in Libya. His name was Tim Hetherington, an Oxford literature graduate who made that documentary Restrepo about an Afghan base.

Stories about the riots in Northern Nigeria are starting to come in, full of amazing details and ridiculous lies. The lies are the first thing you notice.

One of the strange things about this war in Libya is how slowly it’s moving.

Today we’ve got election riots in Northern Nigeria, a military mutiny in Burkina Faso, and massacres in Ivory Coast. They look like separate stories, but they’re not. It’s all one story, a long, slow war between the coastal christianized people…

Today I wanted to talk about the great nominations y’all provided last week when I asked for people’s favorite war books.

Battle of Rich Mountain: McClellan Wimpout Preview Lately I’ve been reading soldiers’ memoirs, mostly from the Western Theater of the Civil War. A lot of them are by Ohio men, and you realize quickly that Grant wasn’t so unique. He…

Ble Goude: Looks tough; good fall guy. We’re in one of the lulls, war-wise, where the short bursts of action stop so the lawyers and whiners can sing their little songs. In Ivory Coast, the UN public-relations department is doing…

A good empire needs torturers, but more than that it needs torturers who keep their mouths shut and tame professors who’ll never, ever mention what they find in the torture archives.

All the gizmo freaks are drooling because the US Navy has supposedly demonstrated a fearsome new “ray gun,” the HEL, High Energy Laser, designed to burn planes, missiles or boats that get too close to surface ships. The trusting Dilberts…

First I have to get today’s big anniversary out of the way.

The IMF: “Liberte, Egalite…Just Give Us the Frickin’ Money!” It was a lively weekend. Down in Ivory Coast, Laurent Gbagbo was ruining the script by holing up in his urban bunker in Abidjan, even though the IMF and their French…

I’ve been thinking it might be a good idea to do the Sunday blog on war books. The only problem is, there are so many great ones it’s hard to decide which one to start with.

Gen. Earl Van Dorn: Dixie girls thought he was handsome, more proof Dixie was insane.   If you ever need to remind yourself that military command isn’t as glamorous as people think, it doesn’t hurt to go over the short,…

NOTE: My links are messed up here, I realize. Found out what’s wrong. I’ll have it fixed in tomorrow’s column. Meantime, here’s the link to the video I’m talking about:   I’ve been watching the famous motorcycle-shooting video from Afghanistan,…

Which’ud Ya Rather Have, A BMW… A couple of the comments on yesterday’s blog were about comparing the RPG-7 and the M2 Carl Gustav Recoilless Rifle. It’s the kind of question I used to love when I talked hardware, but…

Ouattara: Whattarya, A Muslim Militant… Things are popping on the comment front.