Written more than two thousand years ago, texts by ancient Greeks still have a major impact on the modern militaries of today in numerous ways. At the start of the Cold War, the then US secretary of state, George Marshall, read the histories of Herodotus and Thucydides, convinced that the events of the Peloponnesian War…
Category: Historical Study
Historical Study: Ivan the Terrible’s Military Arsenal Found
The full arsenal of a military commander who served Ivan the Terrible has been uncovered in Russia, the Institute of Archaeology of the Russian Academy of Sciences has announced. Found during a survey for a highway expansion outside Zvenigorod, an ancient town 18 miles west of Moscow, the cache consists of helmets stored in leather…
Navy SEAL Sniper Instructor Describes America’s Best Marksman Ever
In this excerpt from The Red Circle: My Life In The Navy SEAL Sniper Corps And How I Trained America’s Deadliest Marksmen, former Navy SEAL sniper instructor Brandon Webb, describes the deadliest sniper in US military history. Everything I’d experienced in the navy up to this point, from those early days as an aircrew search-and-rescue…
Cold War Files: A ‘Texas Tower’ Veteran Reflects on Cold War History
KINGSLEY, Mich. — Each time Victor Rioux sits in a church pew he takes a minute to say a special prayer. He honors the 28 men who died during the Cold War when Texas Tower No. 4 collapsed amid a fierce winter storm. “I never forget those guys,” Rioux said from his Kingsley farm house….
WW2 History: The Most Amazing Lie in History
How a chicken farmer, a pair of princesses, and 27 imaginary spies helped the Allies win World War II This story originally appeared in the September 2014 issue of Mental Floss Magazine. In the weeks leading up to D-day, Allied commanders had their best game faces on. “This operation is not being planned with any…
Ankara’s Hidden Hand: Turkish Covert Ops Then and Now
To put it mildly, Turkey has been substantially involved in Syria since the eruption of the Arab Spring in 2011. After Turkish F-16s recently downed a Su-24 Russian tactical bomber over the region where Turkmen anti-Assad groups are based, Turkish President Erdogan tacitly confirmed Turkey’s covert support for Syrian rebels fighting against Damascus, stating that “anyone…
WW1 History: 1916, A Most Terrible Year
This year I am going to start reading in earnest, a chronological history of The Great War: World War One.-SF BOOKS that focus on what happened in a particular year have become a publishing phenomenon. So Keith Jeffery, a British academic historian whose last work was a fascinating, if slightly plodding, official history of Britain’s…
China’s Military Intelligence System is Changing
As American families dined on turkey and stuffing, China’s Central Military Commission (CMC) was hard at work in Beijing hammering out military reforms. These reforms were then announced to the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) by President Xi Jinping, who also serves as the CMC chairman. The proposed organizational changes may make this round of reform…
NO! You can’t have my Civil Rights, I am Using Them Right Now!
“The ‘looters’ credo’ has brought you to regard your proudest achievements as a hallmark of shame, your prosperity as guilt, your greatest men, the industrialists, as blackguards, and your magnificent factories as the product and property of muscular labor, the labor of whip-driven slaves, like the pyramids of Egypt. The rotter, who simpers that he…
Mosul: Turkey’s Fulda Gap
With all the hoopla lately between Russia and Turkey, this is an interesting article to consider. As I have been studying the history of the Middle East this year, I have added The Fall of the Ottomans to my 2016 reading list. -SF “Our national borders pass through Antioch and span east-ward, containing Mosul,…