I spoke with a military officer who suggested that the recent civil violence in Iraq had accelerated implementation of an “enclave” strategy in Iraq. He thinks this may help us turn the corner; I think he is nuts. The creation…
The ICRC called a press conference to comment on the publication, by the Wall Street Journal, of a confidential January 2004 report on detention in Iraq submitted by to Coalition Forces in February 2004. The report alleged that the conditions…
The Washington Post has an excellent editorial today, linking the human rights abuses in Iraqi prisons with the Bush Administration’s pathological aversion to international norms and conventions: Abuses will take place in any prison system. But Mr. Rumsfeld’s decisions helped…
Working on my dissertation, I’ve noticed a strange fascination among the nuclear warfighting crowd with the idea that 20 million casualties was low enough to risk in a crisis with the Soviets. Here is a passage from Herman Kahn in…
The National Research Council recently released a study (April 2004) of the National Aerospace Initiative, a DDRE/NASA initiative to invest in hypersonics, space access, and space technology. A lot of this research is worthwhile, but a lot is also wasteful.…
Last October, Orbital Sciences Corporation announced that the U.S. Air Force ordered a Minotaur space launch vehicle to launch a classified payload in 2005. The Minotaur launch vehicle provides “low cost, reliable space launch capability in support of U.S. government…
A colleague notes this paragraph in Susan Schmidt’s review of The Politics of Truth: Inside the Lies that Led to War and Betrayed My Wife’s CIA Identity by Joseph Wilson: On the heels of Wilson’s public criticism that intelligence was…
MDA now hopes the NFIRE KV will collide with its target during the “simulated” engagement with a ballistic missile. This would, as ABC News reported, be “the first real step” towards the “unprecedented weaponization of space.” The anonymous Pentagon official…
After the Washington Post reported the intelligence community will raise its estimate of the number of North Korean nuclear weapons from “possibly two” to “at least eight”, Colin Powell tells reporters in Berlin that he is “not aware of a…
Today in the Department of Defense, Tuesday, April 27, 2004 Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld hosts an honor cordon to welcome Italy’s Deputy Prime Minister Gianfranco Fini to the Pentagon at 10:30 a.m. EDT. The “post-facsist” Fini once praised…
