“So let us today drudge on about our inescapably impossible task of providing every week a first rough draft of history that will never be completed about a world we can never really understand.”
Philip Graham,
Former President & Publisher
The Washington Post
On May 24, 2018, President Trump presented the Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest award for valor, to Master Chief Special Warfare Operator Britt Slabinski for embodying the U.S. military’s code of “leave no man…
Command Center at the National Counter-Terrorism Center (NCTC) Breaking Defense By James Kitfield, December 2017 American troops have been fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan for so long that the public doesn’t even celebrate their victories…
By James Kitfield While the Obama administration and much of the global media focused on crises in Ukraine and the Gaza Strip in recent weeks, the centrifugal forces of a sectarian civil war continued to…
By James Kitfield President Obama had finally replied to NSA leaker Edward Snowden’s revelations of the NSA’s massive, globe-spanning spying network. In a speech at the Justice Department Friday, Obama offered some welcome yet modest…
By James Kitfield In these hyper-partisan times perhaps it was inevitable that the Benghazi tragedy that claimed the lives of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans in Libya, just months before a bitterly contested…
By James Kitfield The unsettling news in recent days that Al Qaeda in Iraq (newly renamed the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS) has captured the strategic crossroads town of Fallujah, Iraq, was…
By James Kitfield Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel’s dissing of Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai, refusing to even meet with him on Hagel’s current visit to the region, is a clear indication of just how fed up…
No one should doubt that Iraq is sliding back towards the abyss. Already a resurgent al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) has killed more than 5,000 civilians in 2013, making it the worst year for violence…
By James Kitfield Next year the United States will withdraw its last combat troops from Afghanistan, ending more than a decade of conflict in that country. The threat from the core al Qaeda group that…
Critics of the United States’ hands-off approach to Syria’s civil war have long warned that the costs of doing little to shape the conflict’s outcome would one day outweigh the risks of doing more. The…