IMMEDIATE RELEASE No. 562-10 June 30, 2010 DOD Identifies Army Casualty The Department of Defense announced today the death of a soldier who was supporting Operation Enduring Freedom. Staff Sgt. Brandon M. Silk, 25, of Orono, Maine, died June 21 of injuries sustained when the helicopter in which he was travelling made a hard landing. [...]

From the perspective of journalism, this Mark Perry piece in Foreign Policy isn’t exactly out of bounds, but there’s chalk on its spikes. It’s about a “red team” intelligence group in U.S. Central Command wrote a deliberately provocative piece thinking through the implications of U.S. military strategy in the Middle East not having anything to [...]

The career of Mariano Rivera, and James Traub’s excellent, exquisite, superlative profile of him in the New York Times Magazine. The former has a few flaws — the ninth inning of Game 7 in the 2001 World Series, the Alomar homer — but so few as to be statistical noise. The latter has one big [...]

Good for the White House and the Pentagon. This is a respectful thing to do for Gen. McChrystal.

IMMEDIATE RELEASE No. 559-10 June 29, 2010 DOD Identifies Army Casualties The Department of Defense announced today the deaths of two soldiers who were supporting Operation Enduring Freedom. They died June 27 in Konar, Afghanistan of wounds suffered when enemy forces attacked their unit with small arms fire. They were assigned to the 2nd Battalion, [...]

I get where Tom Ricks’ interlocutor is coming from on this, but wow, is it ever problematic: We must get away from the verbiage of central governance and openly accept that Afghanistan is quintessentially a decentralized society that is further fractured by decades of conflict, complex tribal relationships and geographic terrain that prevents strong central [...]

Starbuck catches the Army’s new online operational-security policy taking an undeserved swipe at LT G, a.k.a. Matthew Gallagher, whose excellent Iraq blog Kaboom became his excellent Iraq war memoir of the same name. This is an altogether different kind of Suck that is not to be Embraced. What a classless thing to do.

IMMEDIATE RELEASE No. 558-10 June 29, 2010 DOD Identifies Army Casualty The Department of Defense announced today the death of a soldier who was supporting Operation Enduring Freedom. Spc. David A. Holmes, 34, of Tennille, Ga., died June 26 at Sayed Abad, Afghanistan, of wounds sustained when insurgents attacked his unit using an improvised explosive [...]

IMMEDIATE RELEASE No. 557-10 June 29, 2010 DOD Identifies Army Casualty The Department of Defense announced today the death of a soldier who was supporting Operation Iraqi Freedom. Pfc. Bryant J. Haynes, 21, of Epps, La., died June 26 in Al Diwaniyah, Iraq, of injuries sustained during a vehicle roll-over. He was assigned to the [...]

IMMEDIATE RELEASE No. 556-10 June 29, 2010 DOD Identifies Army Casualty The Department of Defense announced today the death of a soldier who was supporting Operation Enduring Freedom. Sgt. John M. Rogers, 26, of Scottsdale, Ariz., died June 27 at Forward Operating Base Blessing, Afghanistan, of injuries sustained from a non-combat related incident. He was [...]