BC: 04-21-09

April 21st, 2009 2:50 am
The Gates defense budget
Max Boot looks at the new defense budget and concludes that although he agrees with particular line item cuts and realignments, that overall it is still an “austerity budget” premised on the calculation that the US will largely fight counterinsurgencies in the near future. But Boot is worried that the future may bring surprises and that the US may leave itself unprotected if other scenarios eventuate.

April 20th, 2009 8:58 am
Mosquito versus man
The Los Angeles Times describes the development of the five pound Spike missile at China Lake. The missile represents the continuation of two trends: the requirement for weapons with controllable lethality and the rise of the unmanned platform as the premier weapons delivery system.

April 19th, 2009 5:48 pm
The universe of low life
Rod Norland of the New York Times writes that in Baghdad the best police sources on the activities of the JAM and al-Qaeda are prostitutes.

April 19th, 2009 3:55 am
Korengal
The New York Times describes in an ambush executed by a First Infantry Division platoon on an equivalently sized Taliban unit in the Korangal Valley, resulting in the death of 13 enemy and perhaps many more. The NYT says that “The one-sided fight, fought on the slopes of the same mountain where a Navy Seal patrol was surrounded in 2005 and a helicopter with reinforcements was shot down, does not change the war. … But as accounts of the fight have spread, the ambush, on Good Friday, has become an emotional rallying point for soldiers in Kunar Province, who have seen it as a both a validation of their equipment and training and a welcome bit of score-settling in an area that in recent years has claimed more American lives than any other.”

April 17th, 2009 5:43 pm
Your turn
Glenn Reynolds has a set of links which survey the debates ensuing from Barack Obama’s release of Bush-era legal reviews of interrogation techniques. It raises two separate sets of issues, both of which are linked. The first is whether the interrogation methods used in the past are absolutely repugnant to the American people, and more narrowly, illegal; and secondly whether any of those techniques can be used in the future.