This year now ending I stuck more often than not to Ken Tynan’s authorial motto: “Write heresy, pure heresy.” What a year it has been. My writing in 2014, like pretty much everyone’s in national security affairs, was dominated by...
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The XX Committee: 2014 in Review
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Bureaucracy Keeps Doing Its Thing
On the weekend, The New York Times ran an interesting story about how U.S. Army Major General Michael Nagata, the commander of our Special Operations Forces (SOF) in the Middle East, has been reaching out to experts far beyond the...
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Putin’s Orthodox Jihad
Yesterday Russia announced a revised military doctrine, signed by President Vladimir Putin, that names NATO as the Kremlin’s main adversary and clarifies that Russia’s military reserves the right to respond to conventional threats with both nuclear and conventional weapons. This...
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The 1914 Christmas Truce
The hundredth anniversary of the Great War has brought about ample press coverage of the epic struggle that determined the course of European and Western civilization over the last century. As a historian by background who has written quite a...
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Beware Putin’s Special War in 2015
December 2014 is the month Putin’s Russia was plunged into undeniable crisis. Between the dramatic drop in oil prices and the collapse of the ruble, under Western sanctions pressure, Russians are going into the new year in a dramatically different,...
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Reforming CIA: An Insider’s View
The Central Intelligence Agency has been in the news quite a bit lately. CIA loves good press, in fact it works rather hard at getting it for an ostensibly top secret agency, but little of this news is edifying. Ten...
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Mourir pour Sony?
President Obama’s big news item yesterday, the normalization of relations with Castro’s Cuba, was a headline that, unlike most, really is worthy of attention. As someone who has favored reestablishing U.S.-Cuba ties for years, believing it offers the most direct...
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On My Politics
Some readers have noticed my recent criticism of Democrats and President Barack Obama, particularly relating to national security matters. Some seem quite upset by this, hurling invectives like “RWNJ” (Right-Wing Nut-Job) at me, a common playground term they employ. I...
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CIA Torture: An Insider’s View
The global commentariat is aflutter in the aftermath of yesterday’s release of what Twitter has termed #TortureReport by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI, pronounced “sissy,” to DC insiders). If you’re living in a cave like a member of...
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The Cancer of Advocacy Journalism
Over the last week, the American media has begun, belatedly, to examine a story in Rolling Stone magazine last month which asserted that a horrific gang rape occurred at the University of Virginia, at a named fraternity. The story was...