In all the brouhaha over Benghazi, one thing seems to get less attention among all grandstanding and political posturing. Last September 11th, four public servants -- among them an ambassador -- died in the service of their country. At a quiet ceremony that hardly made news two weeks...

At the turn into the previous century, Theodore Roosevelt invoked the proverb: "Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far." Advising caution and non-aggression, backed up by the ability to do violence if required, Roosevelt contextualized the foreign policy of a rising world power, in his own...

Pope Francis has wasted little time setting a new tone for his institution and those who follow it. Eschewing the usual trappings of material wealth - the papal apartment, the limousine, the fancy shoes, etc. - he is leading in the example of his namesake to remind this generation of...

It's not only Zero Dark Thirty that had a disappointing showing at the Academy Awards. The whole idea that we can simply kill our way out of the problem of international terrorism, using drones or SEAL teams to decapitate al Qaeda franchises by targeting their leadership, has had at best...

Having done about a half-million miles of travel over the last few years, I've found (the late) George Carlin's musings on "airport security" helpful to maintaining my sense of humor when dealing with the sometimes odious and repetitive task of proving to the TSA screeners that I am...

Last month, I had the honor and privilege of attending the first annual Hero Summit, the live-streamed launch of the Newsweek's Hero Project, which looks to "pay tribute to America's deep tradition of service, investigate the phenomenon of moral and physical courage under fire, and explore the very...

As Steven Spielberg's film shows, Abraham Lincoln knew what it meant to live in the moment while remaining conscious of historic chance, realizing his limits as well as the possibilities of the oftentimes inelegant art of politics. History is often made this way, not in grand gestures of magnanimity or...

With the elections now over and a good many of us having performed our most fundamental act of national service in casting a ballot, the largest and most immediate challenge facing the New-Boss-Same-as-the-Old-Boss is the so-called "fiscal cliff" and the possibility -- if not probability -- of massive...

When I was the editor of my high school newspaper, I interviewed our principal, Mr. Fliegner, whose life led an interesting path starting as a "child soldier" in the Hitler Youth pressed to defend Berlin, then -- after a similar indoctrination into the Young Pioneers of the Communist Party --...

Herman Melville is best known for Moby Dick, but perhaps one of his most insightful writings was The Confidence Man, the term in the mid-19th century for what we now more familiarly refer to as con men. Americans are pretty gullible -- you only need to sit up and watch...

One thing I've learned over the years is that, whenever you're being hit with a series of events that would make you think you have a crisis on your hands, it's important to take a step back, a deep breath, and try to think about what's happening with the big...

One thing we've observed from the last decade of wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere is that behavior on the ground can decide success or failure more than just about anything else. For good but especially for bad, the actions of anyone within range of YouTube can have...

The alarm bells have only begun to ring louder in Washington. As sequestration under last year's Budget Control Act seems more and more likely in January, the usual phalanxes of supporters are rattling the sabers of forlorn national security and even economic disaster if defense has to take their 50...

One of my old bosses, Admiral James Stavridis, NATO's Supreme Allied Commander, Europe and Commander of the U.S. European Command, has introduced an interesting new term, if not a new concept -- "open-source security." "Open-source security is about connecting the international, the interagency, the private and public -- and lashing...

A couple of weeks back, I returned with 14 graduate students of the George Mason University Peace Operations Policy Program from a one-week field study course in Liberia. The purpose of the course was for the students -- a dozen of which, interestingly enough, were women -- to do something...

A couple of weeks back, I had the pleasure and privilege of taking my Wide Glide on the "Law Ride" as the kick-off event of National Police Week. The parade of more than 1,200 bikes started at RFK Stadium in Washington, D.C., roared past the Capitol, down Pennsylvania...

Not long ago, I finished reading Rachel Maddow's Drift - The Unmooring of American Military Power, a poignant treatise on the creeping militarization not only of American foreign policy but with implications for our whole system of governance. Maddow succeeds in explaining, in a charmingly non-wonkish way, how we got...

In the waning days of the Cold War, the head of the Soviet Institute turned to U.S. journalist Daniel Schorr and relayed a warning from Mikhail Gorbachev: "We will deprive you of an enemy and then what will you do?" Although the United States had won the Cold...

For all practical purposes, it's game on between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. Get ready for an unprecedented deluge of TV ads and other media storms persisting right up to the first Tuesday of the 11th month, brought to you by your friendly neighborhood Super-PAC. Thanks to a Supreme Court...

When I was in command of the first U.S. Army Civil Affairs battalion to deploy for Operation Iraqi Freedom, spending the first six months in the southern city of An Nasiriyah, it soon became clear to me that, in order to begin facilitating what one of my soldiers called "