Obvious inspiration from Foreign Policy – but, hey, the “Ad” department at War Council is pretty small (me). War Council’s first week is in the bag! Thanks to all those who contributed original content, as well as to all the reader’s that have made this such a successful launch. Particularly thanks to Tom Ricks and his Best Defense readers, who…
Image courtesy of Wikipedia It strikes me that a lot of people are going to head out this weekend to see Lone Survivor this weekend. It was directed by Peter Berg (he did The Kingdom and Friday Night Lights) and stars Mark Walberg as Marcus Luttrell – the “lone survivor” of a SEAL team mission in Afghanistan that went incredibly…
In his New York Times column, David Brooks writes about suicide – and the challenge of interrupting the “idea or story to bring them to the edge of suicide and to justify their act.” Photo courtesy of Flikr user atomicjeep. As someone who has spent a good amount of time in Army-sponsored classrooms (trying to…
Image courtesy of Webdesigner Depot. The Profession of Arms is decaying (weakening or fraying – as opposed to a relative decline), and the primary causes are neglect, anti-intellectual bias, and a creeping, cancerous bureaucracy. Permit me to explain, to diagnose the patient’s condition, in order to arrive at a common understanding of the illness. Let’s begin…
Photo from Tim Heatherington’s book Infidel Author Sebastian Junger gave an interview to NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross on 18 April 2013 about Junger’s new film Which Way is the Front Line From Here? The Life and Times of Tim Heatherington. Heatherington, a British photographer, became very close to Junger while they collaborated on the documentary film Restrepo, which Junger turned…
Photo of old U.S. Embassy in Tehran by Flikr user bashem. **Reader’s Note: These are Major Matt Cavanaugh’s remarks from the October 2013 War Council event on U.S. options toward the Iranian nuclear program. The full event remarks are available at Small Wars Journal. His prompt was to engage with “military strategic considerations.”** Academics and opinion writers engage military…
**Reader’s Note: These are Major Matt Cavanaugh’s remarks from the 6 September 2013 War Council event on intervention in Syria. The full event remarks are available at Small Wars Journal. His prompt was to answer whether intervention in Syria was “wise.”** My task: What is the utility of American force in Syria – is any sort of intervention…
[Note: see video here.] Bill Gates: It’s an inspiration that one person [Leonardo da Vinci] off on their own, with no positive feedback, nobody ever told him, you know, it was right or wrong. That he kept pushing himself. You know, found knowledge in itself to be a beautiful thing. Gates scoffs at any comparison…
Sir Ken Robinson on education… There are three principles on which human life flourishes, and they are contradicted by the culture of education under which most teachers have to labor and most students have to endure. The first is this, that human beings are naturally different and diverse…
[*Note: video available here.] Stephen Biddle of the Council on Foreign Relations and (at one point) the U.S. Army War College, sat down with Harry Kreisler at UC-Berkeley in 2006 to talk about his work in general and his book Military Victory in specific. However, in conversation about his career, he gave an interesting response to…