National Security

On Wednesday some media outlets obtained copies of the heavily embargoed book "No Easy Day" by Mark Owen, the pseudonym of one of the Navy SEALs who was part of the mission that killed Osama bin Laden.

Before dawn on Friday, a man wearing an Afghan uniform shot and killed three U.S. soldiers during a meeting to discuss local security issues in the southern province of Helmand.

It was one of an unprecedented series of five attacks by people in Afghan security forces uniforms in the past week against NATO forces.

Steve Coll explores the Republican presidential hopeful's evolving foreign policy agenda and gaffe-ridden trip abroad. Jennifer Rowland illuminates the American group that poses a greater threat to our national security than al Qaeda. Elizabeth Weingarten hosts.

The impact of drones in the counterterror campaign is hard to overstate:  terror groups, like many organizations, develop into global threats not because they can recruit suicide bombers but because they have leaders with vision, capability, commitment, and experience.  Tactical leaders might view a local government as their primary adversary; strategic leaders, from Osama bin Laden to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Iraq to Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen, have broader horizons.

The escalating dependence on drone pilots, as Maj. Dave Blair agonized in the May-June issue of Air & Space Power Journal, is undercutting the ability to award combat medals. “On the current trajectory,” Blair wrote, “the only Air Medals will be the ones in history books.” In 2009, after all, the Air Force was already training more drone pilots than bomber and fighter pilots combined. Blair’s proposal to give drone pilots combat medals—despite the fact that the pilots sit safely thousands of miles away from the battlefield—is revealing.

Most Americans know roughly as much about the U.S. military as they know about the surface of the moon. It's not that we don't like the military -- we love it! We just don't have a clue who's in it, what it does, what it costs us, or what it costs those who join it. And as a nation, we don't particularly care, either.

Mitt Romney’s speech to the gathering of the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Reno, Nev., offered his most expansive statements on foreign policy since the former governor clinched the Republican Party’s nomination for president. Making headlines was Romney’s suggestion that the White House, and possibly President Obama, has deliberately leaked sensitive intelligence for political gain.

A NEW JOINT FORCE