You know the saying: If you've done nothing wrong, you've nothing to hide. I hear it from my students: I've nothing to hide, so let Big Brother scrutinize my emails, my phone calls, my purchases, my activities online, and so on. Anything to keep us safe...

Yesterday's attacks at the Boston Marathon were horrific. We are right to be outraged. But what we must not become is prisoners of our own fear. "Fear is the mind-killer," as Frank Herbert wrote in Dune.

What increasingly concerns me is our knee-jerk recourse to "lock down." You've probably heard...

Are you afraid of a North Korean missile that poses no threat to the continental United States? Are you afraid that Iran might, just might, be capable of developing an atomic bomb in the next few years, or that China is working on a "stealth" fighter?

I thought...

The Ever-Destructive Dreams of Air Power Enthusiasts

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com

Today’s unmanned aerial vehicles, most famously Predator and Reaper drones, have been celebrated as the culmination of the longtime dreams of airpower enthusiasts, offering the possibility of victory through quick, clean, and selective destruction. ...

Remember the dreaded "fiscal cliff"? It was all the rage in December. The media hyped it. We were told that going off the "cliff" would lead to economic catastrophe.

What happened? How did "sequestration" -- a banal, bureaucratic, deliberately opaque word -- replace "fiscal cliff" in the media and in...

When's the last time our media covered war honestly? When's the last time you saw combat footage of American troops under fire, or of American troops killing others in the name of keeping us safe from enemies? When was the last time you saw an American soldier panicking, firing wildly,...

Let's say you're an American farmer and you want to dig an irrigation ditch between two fields. Before you do so, however, you decide that you simply must ask for permission from a heavily armed foreign soldier who is patrolling in your area. You do so because you want to...

Generals Who Run Amuck, Politicians Who Could Care Less, an “Embedded” Media... And Us

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com

Few things have characterized the post-9/11 American world more than our worshipful embrace of our generals. They’ve become our heroes, our sports stars, and our celebrities all rolled into...

Afghanistan is back in the news in a big way, but for the wrong reasons. General David Petraeus in a tryst with his biographer. A Florida socialite and General John Allen exchange sweet nothings via email. The socialite's sister, her custody battle for her son, and

On March 9, 1945, my father wrote home about an Army video that featured Nazi Germany's latest wonder weapons. My dad had seen tanks and artillery and mortars and machine guns firing, but he had never seen these newfangled Nazi "vengeance" weapons. In his words:

In a movie short they...

Media commentary on the presidential election often focuses on controversial issues like Libya or the latest absurd claim made by some candidate about rape, and of course these are issues of some significance.

But judging by conversations I've overheard in my local barbershop and grocery store, what really matters to...

There were times during last night's presidential debate on foreign policy when the key question seemed to be which candidate loved Israel more. There were other times when it seemed that the key question was which candidate wanted to make our already steroidal military even more muscle-bound. President...

Here's something I'd like to see this campaign season: our two major party candidates debating our wars rather than ignoring them. Both President Obama and Governor Romney prefer to praise the troops rather than to address the tragic consequences of continuing military action in Afghanistan and...

Let's cut to the chase: President Obama won the first presidential debate. Why? Because he maintained his integrity. In the Air Force, our primary core value is "Integrity first." Just as integrity is "first" for the Air Force, so too must it be for the civilian commander-in-chief of our military.

There's little question that unmanned aerial vehicles or drones are helping to save the lives of U.S. and NATO troops in places like Afghanistan while aiding in the killing of terrorist suspects in regions largely inaccessible to ground troops.

But the bigger question is whether drones are in...

Considering the scale of our mistakes over the last decade in Iraq and Afghanistan, if we as a country truly want to pursue a leaner, smarter, more effective foreign policy, the first step we must take is to stop listening to the siren song of our own imperial rhetoric. We...

I'm old enough to remember the Arab oil embargo of 1973 and long lines for gasoline in the United States. A joke that circulated among my schoolmates caught the spirit of the moment. It involved calculators, which were fairly new back then for the masses. It went like this: 142...

Did you know that in 2011 the U.S. government classified more than 92 million documents? Did you know that less than a generation ago, we got by with fewer than six million documents being classified? Along with this explosion in classification and state secrets, did you know that efforts to...

News that the Pentagon is considering a special "Distinguished Warfare Medal" for drone pilots tells us much about the American war-making moment. Leaving aside issues of bravery or courage of drone operators, let's first consider the name of the medal, with its stress on "distinguished...

Two New York Times stories this week capture the persistence of U.S. folly in Afghanistan. The first highlights the persistence of corruption in Afghanistan and our country's key role in funding it. The second showcases the enormous expense of providing U.S. air power as a "force...