Reprinted from Bracing Views with the author’s permission. We just marked the 50th anniversary of the Fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975. Did American officials learn anything from the disastrous Vietnam War? Of course they did. Just not the lessons you’d have wished...
Reprinted from Bracing Views with the author’s permission. “Fighting a war to fix something works about as good as going to a whorehouse to get rid of a clap.” ~ Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead I read Norman Mailer’s fine book about World War II, “The Naked and...
Reprinted from Bracing Views with the author’s permission. The annihilation of Gaza is staggering. Israel has dropped more than 100,000 tons of bombs on Gaza. That’s 100+ kilotons. The Hiroshima bomb was roughly 15 kilotons. That means the small area of Gaza has been...
Reprinted from Bracing Views with the author’s permission. I caught a couple of news items yesterday. The first was a secret Pentagon memo that indicates China is now America’s foremost threat, especially because of fears of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. The second...
Reprinted from Bracing Views with the author’s permission. Officially, the U.S. has the DOD, the department of defense. But when was the last time the U.S. military was primarily oriented toward defense of the CONUS? (CONUS is a military acronym for continental United...
Reprinted from Bracing Views with the author’s permission. President Donald Trump has promised to bomb Yemen for a “long time.” Trump is a real president now. Presidents become “real” when they bomb something. Remember how Trump was praised by the U.S. mainstream...
Reprinted from Bracing Views with the author’s permission. The so-called SignalGate scandal centered on the bombing of Yemen is highly revelatory. First, some resources. CNN has a useful annotated account of the chats exchanged at the highest levels of the Trump...
Reprinted from Bracing Views with the author’s permission. Recent Air Force projects have not been entirely successful, to put it gently. The F-22 Raptor was never built in the quantities the Air Force desired, nor was the B-2 stealth bomber. The F-35 has proven to be...
Reprinted from Bracing Views with the author’s permission. I’ve been reading John Ketwig’s memoir “…and a hard rain fell: A GI’s true story of the War in Vietnam,” and it’s reminding me just how plain dumb, destructive, and duplicitous America’s wars have been since...
Reprinted from Bracing Views with the author’s permission. According to an NBC News poll, America is rooting for Ukraine but Trump prefers Russia. Seriously. That’s the gist of the headline. The intent of this poll wasn’t to analyze how Americans think about the...
