General’s and theoreticians five millennia have insisted you must “know your enemy.” Yet, the list of those who’ve failed to take that advice is long and distinguished. One of history’s truly magnificent failures in understanding the enemy was committed by perhaps the greatest field commander in history: Hannibal. Hannibal invaded Italy in 218 BC and […]

Congress is struggling to pass a budget. President Biden, with a Democratic House and Democratic Senate, still hasn’t passed a budget or the huge infrastructure bill, with several key senators balking at this huge bill; they’ve good cause to balk. The story now coming out of Washington, both the Speaker’s office and the White House, […]

What is it about the French? Or, at least French leadership. True, much of US leadership hasn’t been terribly stellar over the past century, but there’s something about the arrogance of French leaders that’s remarkable. >> >> In July 2017, just two months after assuming office as President of France, Emmanuel Macron canceled the traditional […]

Well before being sworn in as President, Eisenhower was considering options to end the fighting in Korea. Eisenhower’s solution was to make it clear to the leadership in Russia, China, and North Korea that South Korea was now firmly under the US nuclear shield, the nuclear umbrella, as it came to be known. Consideration of […]

There is a wonderful scene in the movie “the Wind and the Lion,” a fictionalized account of the kidnapping of Ion Perdicaris by Mulai Ahmed el Raisuli, Emir of the Jebala tribes, that asks an important question. At the very end of the movie, the Raisuli (played to perfection by Sean Connery) has lost his […]

Editor’s Note: So there is the excitement on The Hill this morning, and we could talk about that. The minutes are fading away in a vista abruptly truncated by the hands of the clock tonight. We oldsters have a saying for that, but I can’t remember what it is. In terms of The Hill, there […]

The mess that was the US and NATO departure from Afghanistan is officially over, but pieces of it grind on. One estimate suggests there may be 500 US citizens remaining in Kabul itself, hundreds more (if not thousands) scattered around the rest of the country, and, per one of the several advocacy groups, more than […]

What country harbored Al Qaeda and the Taliban after they left Afghanistan in 2002? What country provided substantial, detailed support to Libyan, Iranian and North Korean nuclear weapons development programs? What country provided overflight rights to the US to access Afghanistan from 2001 to 2021, in exchange for more than $1 billion in military aid […]

The US Army did not win the war in Europe in 1945. Leaving aside any argument about what the US and the British and others did versus what the Russian Army did, the two tasks given to the US Army were somewhat more limited in scope: Marshall tasked the Army to “Enter the Continent of […]

You can already hear the first faint echoes of the experts running through the halls of power in Washington, screaming, Cassandra like: “I told them! I told them!” Hmmm… Years ago, Michael Handel, a professor at the Naval War College, made the point that an intelligence officer’s duty was not simply to gather the facts […]