Interstate warfare is a thankfully unusual occurrence in the present day. State-assisted nonstate groups frequently fight governments, a scenario currently unfolding in Syria, Eastern Ukraine, and a host of other places. But you’d have to go back to the US-led invasion of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 2003, or the Eritrea-Ethiopia conflict of the late 1990s for an example…
Category: Historical Study
World War Two Non-Fiction Book Review: The Winter Fortress by Neil Bascomb
As both a student of World War Two and of the SOE and OSS, this book marks one of the high points of the SOE’s plan to “Set Europe Ablaze”. There was no other operation as important as this one in stopping Hiters War Machine from getting The Atomic Bomb in the early years of…
Three Minutes to Midnight: Closer to Nuclear Conflict Than We Think
While at Stanford last month, we had a long conversation with former Secretary of Defense William Perry about the nuclear dangers facing the world. We were struck by his provocative and frightening outlook: that the possibility of a nuclear catastrophe today is greater than it was during the Cold War. North Korea’s recent bluster only…
Russian Subs Are Reheating a Cold War Chokepoint
As the GIUK gap returns to importance, NATO must look to regenerate its anti-submarine force. The recent U.S. promise to fund upgrades to Iceland’s military airfield at Keflavik is no diplomatic bone thrown to a small ally. The improvements will allow the U.S. Navy’s new P-8 Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft to keep an eye on…
Brush-Up On Your History: When Terrorist First Attacked the U.S.
A hundred years ago this month, the nation was blindsided by the first act of terrorism on U.S. soil—at the hands of Mexican troops commanded by the revolutionary Pancho Villa. It has been 100 years since the first act of terror on U.S. soil was committed by revolutionary Francisco “Pancho” Villa. On March 9, 1916…
Cold War Non-Fiction Book Review: Special Tasks – The Memoirs of an Unwanted Witness – A Soviet Spymaster
Published in 1994 by Little Brown and Co.; 509 pp My Administration for Special Tasks,” Sudoplatov begins, “was responsible for sabotage, kidnapping and assassination of our enemies beyond the country’s borders.” The administration to which he refers was one of the key divisions in Stalin’s security police, an agency he headed from the summer of…
Military Weapons from the Past: Americas First Rolling Armored “Shotgun”
A weird little Marine Corps tank blasted North Vietnamese troops Designed and built in a farm tractor factory and armed with six 106-millimeter recoilless rifles, the M-50A1 Ontos was rejected by the Army and only purchased in small numbers by the Marine Corps. Years later in Vietnam, the USMC trained infantry riflemen to drive these…
Military History: The U.S. Navy’s “Douche” Boat Washed Away Viet-Cong Bunkers
In the early morning hours of June 10, 1969, U.S. Navy vessels sailed down a stretch of the Vam Co Dong River in South Vietnam. The force included a special weapon sailors called a “douche boat,” which could literally wash away Viet Cong fortifications. “My assigned mission was to search out and destroy … bunkers,…
World War II History: Hitler, The One That Got Away?
Quentin Tarantino reimagined the end of World War II as only he could — with Hitler being machine-gunned to death in a movie theater by Jewish GIs. Inglourious Basterds, the director’s 2009 eight-time-Oscar-nominated moneymaker of a flick, made absolutely no effort to tell the truth, and maybe we’re all better off for it. But film…
World War Two History: Landing at Scarlet Beach
This sketch by Roy Cecil Hodgkinson depicts the situation at the south end of Scarlet Beach in New Guinea on 22nd September 1943 – half an hour after the first wave of Operation Diminish had landed. ‘Diminish’ was the name given to the initial phase of the Huon Peninsula campaign of the Second World War,…