War Is Boring

For a decade, Franz Gayl has advocated for some of the most important U.S. military technologies. As a science adviser to the Marine Corps, Gayl lobbied for the Pentagon to purchase nonlethal lasers, bomb-resistant trucks and surveillance drones and to develop concepts for transporting troops through space. He also proposed a radical approach to ending this year’s Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

Franz Gayl, a Marine Corps scientist, has fought hard over the years to get lifesaving gear to frontline troops. He even advanced a bold plan to end the Gulf oil spill earlier. For his heroic work, a resentful Marine bureaucracy has punished him, ultimately resulting in this. Please read this story. It’s indicative of a lot that’s wrong in the U.S. military today.

This summer, when U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates called on the four U.S. military branches to reduce their overhead costs by $100 billion over the next few years, he probably didn’t have this in mind. It has come to light that the U.S. Air Force, in an effort to avoid the lawsuits and delays that have plagued many of its recent aircraft purchases, is exploiting an obscure legal loophole to buy new helicopters without launching a competition.

Haji Zaki, at left in the photo, is just 26 years old. But politically, he’s an old hand. His father was a famed general and powerbroker, and little Haji benefited from an early exposure to Afghanistan’s wheelings and dealings. In an election two months ago, he snagged the presidency of the Parwan provincial council.

by DAVID AXE A year ago, Russia and Georgia fought a brief, bloody war over Georgia’s breakaway region of South Ossetia. Russia won, and today South Ossetia is essentially autonomous, and a Russian client. The conflict featured propaganda efforts on both sides. Photographers in Georgia took several photographs, allegedly depicting civilians slain by Russian shelling, [...]

by DAVID AXE From Rob Farley: Long story short, a small firm named Crater developed a coupler that could conceivably be used to help tap undersea cables. Lucent Technologies developed an interest in the coupler and played around with it for a bit until it decided that the device was, indeed, appropriate for a contract [...]

In a review of Tom Ricks’ new book The Gamble, Josh Trevino highlights so-called “transitional figures” who played important roles in the implementation of the Iraq “surge” strategy that helped turn the tide against extremists. “The most surprising — and least discussed — transitional figure in The Gamble is President George W. Bush,” Trevino writes: [...]

“The world has to get used to taking care of itself,” analyst Loren Thompson declared at a confab in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday. Thompson and a host of speakers reached a consensus: owing to the financial crisis and the inability to pay for complex weapons programs, the United States will have to “scale back its [...]

Anthony Cordesman from the Center for Strategic and International Studies blasted the Bush Administration’s early national security team in a devastating speech at National Defense University, calling Donald Rumsfeld and his lieutenants the “worst national-security team of the postwar era.” But the leadership failures continue, Cordesman claimed, resulting in the “worst-run Department [of Defense]” in [...]

A shiny penny to anyone who can detect the contradiction in one general’s assessment of the Afghanistan supply-line problem. (Emphasis mine.) Despite dangers U.S. convoys face in delivering supplies to coalition forces in Afghanistan by way of Pakistan, military operations there aren’t susceptible to those threats, the Defense Department’s top uniformed logistician said Feb. 26. [...]

Chicago is on Forbes’ new list of most “miserable” American cities. The annual list calculates “misery” based on several factors, including unemployment, the performance of local sports teams and government corruption. It’s the corruption problem that landed Chicago on the list. Consider: The Northern District [U.S. Attorney's] office boasts of recent successful prosecutions, including “a [...]