God help this country when someone sits in this chair who doesn't know the military as well as I do.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower

In late December, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta assured Representative Frank Wolf (R-VA) that the United States was "making undeniable progress"...

As he was announcing his second increase in troops for Afghanistan in December 2009, President Obama promised that by July 2011 those troops would begin coming home. As relayed by Bob Woodward's book, Obama's Wars, we know the president was skeptical about the United States' war effort in Afghanistan. Now,...

In the Autumn of 2006, in the western part of Iraq's Anbar Province, US Marine and Army units were taking dozens of attacks a day. Leaving one of the many bases we occupied in the Euphrates River Valley seemingly guaranteed a firefight, attack by a sniper or, more likely, a...

General David Petraeus is in Washington, D.C., this week and, as expected, we are hearing claims of success and progress. No matter that we've heard these assertions and predictions before or that our elected representatives, charged on our behalf with oversight, are failing to ask such basic and...

This week marks the one-year anniversary of the US military offensive into Marjah in Helmand Province in southern Afghanistan. Operation Moshtarak, as it was called, was the largest military operation in Afghanistan since the removal of the Taliban regime in the fall of 2001. However, it served not just as...

The below is an email I received last week from a friend of mine in the Army on his second combat deployment to Afghanistan. In addition to his two Afghan deployments, he has fought for our country in both Iraq wars.

Unfortunately, I cannot attribute his views by name,...

While the numbers of Americans killed in service in Afghanistan are often reported, the numbers of the wounded are under-reported. The number of wounded service members per month is approximately six hundred. That's twenty a day or nearly one every hour. Many people find that surprising, as reports...

Several media outlets, including the Guardian and McClatchy, reported this week that US Marines in one part of Sangin, one of the most violent districts in Helmand Province, have, through 25 days of negotiations, reached a deal with local Afghan leaders. It is, of course, too...

I wrote this post last week on the Afghanistan Study Group's blog and felt it was appropriate to re-post today, as the questions and concerns posed went unanswered by the Obama Administration's Strategic Review of Afghanistan:

A few thoughts on the Obama Administration's Afghanistan Strategy Review that is...

When we launched the Afghanistan Study Group project and presented our first report in September, I read the following quote from one of America's commanding generals in Afghanistan:

"What we're doing is moving to a more classic counterinsurgency strategy here in Afghanistan... That's a fairly...

In a few weeks the US will mark its 110th month of combat operations in Afghanistan -- the same length of time as the Soviet Union's own military presence in that country. With the media focused this week on the planned announcement in Lisbon of a US and NATO commitment...

Next month the Obama administration will review the US strategy in Afghanistan and Pakistan outlined by President Obama last December.

Today's report from McClatchy supposes that the president and his administration will begin distancing the administration from the exit strategy he advanced last fall. If the administration decides to...

From November 2002 to April 2004 I was the junior Marine officer on the personal staff of the Secretary of the Navy. My duties primarily related to correspondence and protocol, but I was also a member of what then was known as the Secretary's Action Team (SAT), a body that...

By the time this is posted the polls for America's 2010 midterm elections will have closed. This year's midterm elections bore many similarities to our nation's last midterm in 2006: record levels of campaign spending, anger and disappointment at the president translated into popular sentiment against the governing party (and...

I had the pleasure last week of being interviewed alongside noted author and human rights advocate Ann Jones. The conversation focused on the reports of negotiations (real or otherwise) in Afghanistan and quickly moved into a discussion on the centrality and importance of women's rights to...

Yesterday's reports by the New York Times and the Associated Press provide a few reasons for cautious optimism that US policy may be shifting towards a more sensible and productive direction in Afghanistan*. Despite previous disingenuous statements about the need for and support of a political...

Last week saw several reports, including in the Washington Post and the Guardian, claiming renewed or invigorated contacts between the Karzai administration and the Taliban. This has been reported on several occasions throughout the US' nine year involvement in the Afghan war, most recently in 2008...

Monday and Tuesday's front page stories for the Washington Post further detail the frustrated decision making process that went into last December's order by President Obama to increase US forces in Afghanistan by an additional 30,000 (on top of the 21,000 additional troops sent by the...

I wanted to respond to critiques registered by Andrew Exum and Joshua Foust to the report issued by the Afghanistan Study Group last Wednesday (view video of the launch event at CSPAN).

My colleagues on the Afghanistan Study Group,