Army Staff Meetings and their Corresponding Cocktails

Weโ€™ve all been there. Itโ€™s 1700 on a Friday and youโ€™re still stuck in a meeting that began at 1300, and the S-3 still has twenty more slides to brief. What you could really use right now is a good stiff drink. Your mind wanders off to consider your options, as the monotonous drone of …

Is the Way the Army Looks at Uniforms Completely Wrong?

This piece was inspired by Alice Rawsthornโ€™s TED Talk on design. Ever been that one person at a Revolutionary War battlefield who loudly questioned why the British were wearing bright red coats that made them extremely visible? Or looked at pictures of Polish winged hussars and thought they seemed preposterous? Or wondered why U.S. dragoons …

Is DoD Contracting Out of Control?

When I walked off the ramp of the C-17 and theย dusty heat of Bagram Airfield slapped me in the face, I went through the same thought process asย thousands of U.S. servicemembers before me: what the hell am I even doing here? ย  It was the fall of 2013,ย andย I was arriving in Afghanistanย to participate in the …

Not Understanding the Fight Against ISIS: An Open Letter to Donald Trump

Todayโ€™s guest post comes from Barefoot Boomer, who is a glutton for punishment, this being his second post. Read his first post here.ย Boomer is a career Army officer and strategist. He is also a historian with an emphasis in American and German military history. ย The content and opinions of this article are the authorโ€™s only …

Mil-splaining Memorial Day: Stop it

So Memorial Day weekend is just about upon us, which means one thing: the proliferation of Memorial Day memes in my Facebook feed that waver back and forth between letting me know the differences between this holiday and Veterans Day, and letting me know that no fun is to be had this weekend. And like …

Why ISIS Will Outlast the Coalition Arrayed Against It, and Why Itโ€™s Our Own Damn Fault

Today's guest post comes from Barefoot Boomer. Boomer is a career Army officer and strategist. He is also a historian with an emphasis in American and German military history.  The content and opinions of this article are the authorโ€™s only and do not reflect the opinions of the United States Army or the Department of …

Galactic Lessons Never Learned

Full warning: I've got spoilers in here. A heap of them. No, not the plot spoilers you fear so much: the spoilers on how no one in the Star Wars universe learns a damn thing. A while back I wrote about how the Empire could've bounced back from the loss of Death Star II, Darth …

The Donald Meets The Bard: If Trump were Henry V

Last week, presidential candidate and Republican nominee-presumptive Donald Trump decided to put on a more presidential tone. He gave a speech on foreign policy, won some primaries, and knocked the other Republican candidates out of the race. So it seems that through the will of the People, he has a shot at being President of …

Get Out of the Way and Let Us Do Our Jobs: A NCO’s Perspective

Today's post is by guest author, SoonerGrunt. He is a retired Army non-commissioned officer with twenty-two years of experience in both the Regular Army and the Army National Guard. My Twitter friend Angry Staff Officer had a response from a junior officerโ€™s perspective to a blog post entitled โ€œ31 Things Your Senior Rater Wants You …

And Then? What Happens After Victory Over Daesh

Since 2014 and their declaration of the Caliphate, this thing called ISIS has been dominating the news cycle. From destruction of antiquities to the massacre of civilians, ISIS has been losing friends and influencing people in negative ways for quite some time. But even as politicians call for carpet bombing of this non-state pretender-state actor, …