It’s kind of an impressionistic post, I concede, but I had a number of troops approach me this month with their doubts about the war they’re fighting or working to support. No one really wanted to go on the record with them, for the obvious reasons of command reprisal. Admittedly, this is a non-representative sample, [...]

Yes, I went there, for Danger Room. Special guest appearance by the “Separation” interrogation technique authorized by the infamous Appendix M. Now a word of recognition. USA Today covered two of the same topics I covered in Afghanistan before I did. Not just touring Parwan (shout to Alan Gomez), but also the MC-12 (shout to [...]

BAGRAM AIR FIELD, Afghanistan — I interviewed Gen. Petraeus on Tuesday in Kabul for Danger Room. In this post, Petraeus provides his most fulsome explanation to date of how he’ll structure troop reductions after July 2011. And in this one, he discloses the intense operational tempo that Special Operations Forces are experiencing this summer; discusses [...]

Encountering one of these drones is a bewildering experience. I suggest reading Danger Room in the near future for more on the circumstances that got me this close to an instrument of war that looks like H.R. Geiger designed it. Behind me and to my left is the bay where the Hellfire missile goes. I’m [...]

BAGRAM AIR FIELD, Afghanistan — So it turned out that I couldn’t get to some of the places out east in Afghanistan that I wanted to see, through no fault of the efforts of very hardworking public-affairs officers who tried to facilitate it. As a result, I’ve had a limited ability to acquire ground truth [...]

What happened today? Over at Danger Room, that is? Couple things. We looked at the weekend’s U.S.-South Korea naval/air exercise in the East Sea/Sea of Japan. Checked out the Air Force’s solicitation for an intelligent robotic cargo pallet. Examined the intersection of drone strikes and the CIA’s new top operations official. And reported on the [...]

The big Danger Room post today? James Clapper’s confirmation hearings to become the next director of national intelligence. Owing to the Post series and all the focus around it, I opted to focus on contractors. Clapper drew some distinctions between the different sorts of intel functions contracted out and pledged to work with the Senate [...]

I’ve slacked on this lately, I know. But today at Danger Room, Noah and I tried to distill the first installment of the Post’s “Top Secret America,” I arched an eyebrow at the ODNI pushback on the series, chortled at Hezbollah’s anti-Israel war museum and announced a hiatus/retooling of a feature I’m 100 percent committed [...]

So: today. The Globe & Mail‘s Paul Koring is a great, wise, judicious and thorough reporter whom I was lucky to meet/drink with/learn from in April and May while covering Omar Khadr’s military commission at Guantanamo Bay. Then he became one of the four reporters banned for reporting Joshua Claus’s identity. He told me for [...]

You know what the first thought was that went through my mind this morning? “I bet,” I couldn’t help but think, “I’m going to get into a fight with the Soup Nazi from Seinfeld today.” And sure enough, that was how my workday capped off. Before that happened, I went to a cybersecurity conference and [...]