Doomed: Saudi Arabia Will Fail in Yemen By Asher Orkaby As the warring Yemeni parties gather for preliminary peace talks in Geneva, Saudi Arabia continues its unrelenting bombing campaign against the tribes of the Houthi movement. For two and a half months, the air forces of the Saudi coalition have targeted military sites, homes and…
Category: Military History
Netflix Pix: Point and Shoot
For those of you out there that don’t mind homemade movies, you might like this quirky, offbeat documentary of Matthew Van Dyke, an American College Graduate who suffers with OCD who sets out to see the world and really experience life first hand. (WARNING: SPOILER ALERT!) He buys a Video Camera, a Motorcycle and a…
How the US Army Rangers the Became Bad-Asses They are Today
By Christian Beekman During World War II, Darby’s Rangers embodied the spirit of today’s forces: Rangers lead the way. June 19, 1942, is not a familiar date to most. But members of the Army’s elite 75th Ranger Regiment know it well; it’s the date of activation of the 1st Ranger Battalion, under the command of…
Why the Average Civilian should study Asymmetrical Warfare
From the Archives, 2015. I got asked this question the other day by a close friend and it occurred to me that I had never really plainly answered that question on this blog, even though I talk about the subject frequently. I think the best way to approach this subject is through historical precedent. It…
The Missed Counter-Insurgency Lessons in Lone Survivor (Film)
(Normally, we start the year with our “Most Intriguing Event of the Year”. But since Lone Survivor hit theaters across the country on January 10th, we’re devoting this week to that topic. To read all of our Lone Survivor posts, please click here. The most important post is “A List of the Mistakes and Differences…
Unsung Heroes: The Soldier Who Destroyed An Enemy Mortar Position With A Jammed M-16
By Corey Adwar on June 18, 2015 Although he singlehandedly charged the enemy and protected sensitive U.S. military information, Pfc. Patrick Miller’s heroics were overshadowed and forgotten by a more sensational story. The March 23, 2003, ambush of 507th Maintenance Company in Nasiriyah, Iraq, was both a military and public relations disaster. Of 31 soldiers…
Netflix Pix: The Invisible Front
The story of Freedom Fighter Juozas Luska and his band of partisans fighting the soviets in post-World War II Lithuania is one of the most inspiring and tragic tales of the fight against oppression and communism in the 20th century I have ever read about. You can read about it In his book, Forest Brothers, or…
Taking a Spoon to a Gunfight
David Maxwell April 2, 2014 · in Commentary Taking a Spoon to a Gunfight: The West Dealing with Russian Unconventional and Political Warfare in Former Soviet States As the Russians now try to reach a diplomatic solution in order to consolidate their gains in Crimea – as evidenced by Putin’s call to Obama and SECSTATE’s…
Learning from Insurgent Tactics: Going to Ground
PREPARING FOR WARFARE’S SUBTERRANEAN FUTURE by Benjamin Runkle Amidst the myriad mistakes associated with the Iraq War, perhaps none were as costly in terms of lives of U.S. personnel as the failure to anticipate the threat posed by improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and, subsequently, to rapidly develop technologies capable of detecting and defeating the insurgents’…
Learning from Insurgent Tactics: The Vehicle as a Weapon
The attack on Dallas PD this past Saturday by a man in an armored van represents a variation on a tactic that has not been seen since the DC Sniper Murders in 2002, where a man and his young accomplice, using a Chevy Caprice sedan and turning the trunk into a “mobile” sniper hide,…