It took me a while to figure out why everybody was nagging me to do a column on the Iranian elections. Everybody seemed to think it was all mysterious and world-shaking. Finally I realized, you’re all het up because every…
June 18th, 2009 | Comments (72)
Kandy Man with long name who fought the Brits. Key fact: in Sri Lanka heroes were allowed to get fat, another reason to like the place. You see some pretty sick stuff when you do my job, but I just…
May 22nd, 2009 | Comments (141)
Velupillai Prabhakaran: LTTE’s Guerrilla Generalissimo One thing you have to give the doomed Tamil rebels in Sri Lanka credit for: their supporters sitting in comfortable first-world cities have no shame when it comes to begging for help. Militarily the Sri…
May 11th, 2009 | Comments (50)
There’s a new TV show called Warriors running on the History Channel that’s a current favorite of mine. I hesitate to mention it, because no doubt it’s pretty basic stuff. I hate to think what Gary Brecher would say about…
April 27th, 2009 | Comments (22)
(Editor’s Note: Since this article was published yesterday for subscribers, Mr. Brecher has published a big follow-up which we post below after this article.) I’ve been saying for a long time that aircraft carriers are just history’s most expensive floating…
April 1st, 2009 | Comments (263)
The eXile: Sex, Drugs and Libel in the New Russia By Mark Ames and Matt Taibbi Yea, the Lord has heard thine prayers, and He, in His infinite Sadism, has answered thee: back on sale, newly printed up, is the…
November 23rd, 2008 | Comments (1)
Zia ul-Haq: the Pakistani Dracula with the dead raccoon eyes. Well, time to ease out of my chair and get back to work, because people have been yelling at me to finish off that “Islamablog” series I started about the…
October 7th, 2008 | Comments (2)
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.
The political establishment’s racist, authoritarian reaction to the 1992 LA riots—blaming broken black families, massing cops and troops, and Ron Paul’s advice to his family on how to kill black “animals” and get away with it…
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…
