Opinion: It’s Still George Bush’s World – AOL News
Even more than a year after his inauguration, President Barack Obama’s foreign policy agenda is still largely devoted to fixing the messes he inherited from Bush. And that’s likely to continue to be the case for quite some time to come, unless Obama makes a more fundamental [...]

In a recent report, Major General Michael T. Flynn, Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence in Afghanistan levels a damning indictment against the U.S. conduct of the war in Afghanistan.  He argues,
Eight years into the war in Afghanistan, the U.S. intelligence community is only marginally relevant to the overall strategy. Having focused the overwhelming majority [...]

Matthew Yglesias » Home Page
Basically the military, and people with a military background, and people with a basically military orientation, have all come to appreciate that civilian economic development is very relevant to the kinds of security issues they are charged with tackling. The problem, however, is that the number of things people have to [...]

The whole post is excellent, and the conclusions a very nice summary of the key problems with COIN:
Sic Semper Tyrannis : Counterinsurgency – a much failed strategy?
COIN is a badly flawed instrument of statecraft: Why?
- The locals ultimately own the country being fought over. If they do not want the “reforms” you [...]

Matthew Yglesias » Generals in Politics
Yesterday General McChrystal expressed “regret” for some remarks he made in London that were seen as undermining the civilian decision-making process. Spencer’s always thought the story was overblown, which is what I thought at the time, but in retrospect I think the real story is a bit different. What we [...]

In the past week or so, we’ve seen the emergence of what must be the most curious — okay bizarre — argument yet about why the United States should remain in Afghanistan.  According to Jari Lindholm and Joshua Foust, both normally thoughtful regional experts, the war in Afghanistan is crucial to prevent a nuclear war [...]

I’ve been writing in several blog threads my concerns about McChrystal’s new guidance document, most notably at Abu Muqawama: COMISAF COIN Guidance Released | Center for a New American Security.
But it is probably worthwhile to summarize my views:
(1) The guidance seems like a perfectly reasonable set of principles for any army operating in a foreign [...]

Stephen Biddle is the single best defense analyst working today. His arguments are usually carefully considered and well supported empirically. For a generation of younger defense intellectuals, he is very much the gold standard, the model to emulate.
His recent essay in the American Interest (Is It Worth It? The Difficult Case for War in Afghanistan) [...]

In a recent post on his blog (Losing Patience with GIRoA), Exum makes a startling argument that raises fundamental questions about whether mainstream counter-insurgency theorists — of which Exum is one of the most prominent examples — actually understand the connection between military forces and political goals.
He writes:
There is a growing realization that we can [...]

There is a frustrating tendency in media coverage of the defense budget, that is the assumption that if Congress adds anything to a the Department of Defense’s budget request it is an example of political pork (Pork-Laden Defense Bill Weighed). Often it is, but sometimes it isn’t. In the current defense appropriation bill, [...]