1st Item - Hat Tips to...
Moderator Adds
I have today, 9th March 2016, merged in fifty-three threads which refer to blogs. I have not merged in many that debate the contents of a particular blog entry.
Since many of the blogs date back to 2006 they may no longer be active. Some were Member Blogs, but from memory they have not posted here for a long time.
There was a SWJ Blog Roll, but I cannot locate that now (Ends).
Blogs that have most graciously plugged or linked to us as we started this grand adventure:
The Adventures of Chester
Caerdoria
Cox and Forkum
HeyDudeWhoa!
Irregular Analyses
Ludovic Monnerat
Michelle Malkin
Power and Control
Prairie Pundit
ZenPundit
Maybe I should plug my own blog here
I got my own blog at http://hansmeister.blogspot.com/.
I only recently restarted it after a long hiatus, I'm focusing it on foreign policy and domestic politics. It still needs some work, but it's a start.
Liberals Against Terrorism (COIN Page)
Liberals Against Terrorism - Counterinsurgency. Stumbled on this while researchng another issue.... Some interesting discussions here at first glance - have not conducted any background research on the site - just throwing it out for our forum members' info.
Sunday Spotlight: PrairiePundit
PrairiePundit. Very good read for a quick down and dirty of current events and major issues. Maintained by SWC member Merv Benson.
The View From On The Ground
Blog by a Fairbanks Daily-News Miner embed - Reporting from Iraq.
Quote:
Think about everything you’ve heard about the conditions in Iraq, the role of U.S. forces, the multi-layered complexities of the war.
Then think again.
I’m a journalist. I read the news everyday, from several sources. I have the luxury of reading stuff newspapers don’t always have room to print. I read every tidbit I could on Iraq and the war before coming.
Everything I thought I knew was wrong.
Maybe not wrong, but certainly different than the picture in my head....
More than anything in the last few days I’ve heard from soldiers and commanders that people back home don’t quite get it. They don’t see the real picture. They don’t get the real story. Some of them, like Lt. Col. Gregg Parrish, look seriously pained in the face when he says only a part of the picture is being told; the part of car bombs and explosives and suicide bombers and death. It’s a necessary part of the picture, but not a complete one, he says.
I’ve listened to the soldiers and Parrish about the missing pieces of the puzzles that don’t reach home. My selfish, journalistic drive immediately thinks “Perfect. A story that hasn’t been told. Let me at it.”...
Battlefield Blogs Take Iraq War Into Homes of America
26 Dec. London Daily Telegraph - Battlefield Blogs Take Iraq War Into Homes of America.
Quote:
... In a development that is increasingly worrying US military commanders in Iraq, a growing number of American soldiers - 200 at the last count - have set up their own blogs, or internet diaries, and are updating them from the battlefield.
The phenomenon, facilitated by the provision of internet cafes at almost all US camps to permit soldiers regular contact with home, has for the first time allowed personal reports of the reality of combat to be read as they happen...
A US military spokesman said that failing to maintain some form of control of what soldiers were writing would be tactically naive as it could provide information that could aid the enemy.
"We don't have a problem with most of what they write," he said. "But we don't want them to give away the farm."
AEI Interview with Robert Kaplan at Regions of Mind
Geitner Simmons, Editorial Page editor of The Omaha World Herald and blogger at Regions of Mind has a post up featuring an interview with Robert Kaplan, author of Imperial Grunts.
An excerpt:
Quote:
"TAE: Why do so many reporters, academics, and some everyday Americans think that people who go into the Army or Marines must be folks who didn't have bright prospects in college or the civilian work force?
Kaplan: To be diplomatic, I think it's class prejudice and snobbery. Because most of the people I meet in the lower ranks aren't poor or from the ghetto — they're the solid working class, which does still exist. They're from non-trendy places in between the two coasts, or from working-class urban neighborhoods.
Look, for example, at one of the Special Forces teams I was with in Algeria. The executive officer, a graduate of The Citadel, was from a farming family in Indiana. The master sergeant was from a farming family in New Hampshire. The warrant officer grew up in an Italian section of Queens, New York. That's America. Whites in the barracks get very insulted if you confuse them with so-called white trash, and African Americans in the barracks get tremendously insulted if you confuse them with people in the inner city. With both groups, some of them may have come from the underclass, but they've long since separated themselves from it. They have no class envy."
New Blog Added to SWJ Blog Roll
The Officers' Club - Great stuff - check it out.
Small Wars Journal Blog Roll.
Counterterrorism & Fourth Rail Blogs Merge
SWC Member & Blogger Merv Benson...
Quoted in the Wall Street Journal's Best of the Web.
Quote:
... And reader Merv Benson:
The al Qaeda document you reported on described the media strategy as one in which al Qaeda bombs and the media blames the U.S. and Iraqi forces for not stopping it. Sure enough, that is exactly the spin that the Washington Post puts on the Tal Afar story. Shouldn't they at least acknowledge that they are following the enemy's script?
Just to be different, how about discussing the wickedness of fooling noncombatants into thinking they are getting bargain flour so that they can be murdered and be part of a story attacking people not responsible for their murder?...
Merv's Blog can be found here - Prairie Pundit.
Midnight in Iraq and AfghaniDan
Two blogs added to the SWJ blogroll:
Midnight in Iraq - US Marine currently deployed to Fallujah, Iraq.
AfghaniDan - US Marine currently deployed to Jalalabad, Afghanistan.
MilBlogs - Check it Now - Check it Often...
MilBlogs - and a hat tip for the link...
Arms & Influence Blog - EBO? BFD.
New Blog added to the SWJ Blogroll - Arms and Influence - check out the thread EBO? BFD...
Note on Arms & Influence archives
A&I is an excellent addition.
Since the importance of COIN is very high on this board, members will be very interested in the extended " Counterinsurgency" series in the A&I archives.
Arab Life: An Outsider’s View
From the Midnight in Iraq blog - Arab Life: An Outsider’s View.
Quote:
Since I have had the opportunity to see a few Arab homes, and to observe and interact at some length with the populace here in Falluja, I thought it might be interesting to point out a few of the similarities and differences between the life we know and that of an Iraqi. Hundreds of customs and courtesies surround the Arab culture. Upon my arrival here, I didn’t know what to believe and what to shrug off as nonsense. I quickly realized that most things I had learned from Ustatha Samir during “culture time” in Arabic class held true in the real world. It’s always rather surreal to imagine life drastically different than American culture without actually experiencing it, but after seeing this small part of the Arab world with my own eyes, I know I’ll never forget it...
Observations & Tips for Operating in "Developing" Countries
By SWC member Sonny at his FX-Based blog - Random (and Very Personal) Observations and Some Tips for Operating in "Developing" Countries.
Quote:
I admit the title of this post is awkward. The following observations and some tips are based on recent experience (meaning early 1990s to the present day) traveling in what some might still call the Third World, some call "the Gap", and some call "developing countries". The last thing I want to do is lump all this countries into one big pile. Each country (and each region within each country) is unique. I might narrow down my focus to particular areas in the future, but for now (partly due to OPSEC) I want to stay way from mentioning specific countries. My observations are based on "official business" and vacation trips, informal interviews with colleagues and some perspective that comes from growing up outside of the US. For the most part, these are not hard and fast rules and variations apply depending to where you go. These observations apply to areas where there is no actual combat, but where warfare is never far in terms of time and space...
Check it out...
Institutional Ignorance of Warfare
by SWC member Merv Benson - Institutional Ignorance of Warfare on his Prairie Pundit blog.
Quote:
... One of these years, perhaps Wisconsin really will get around to hiring a professor for the Ambrose-Heseltine chair — but right now, for all intents and purposes, military history in Madison is dead. It’s dead at many other top colleges and universities as well. Where it isn’t dead and buried, it’s either dying or under siege. Although military history remains incredibly popular among students who fill lecture halls to learn about Saratoga and Iwo Jima and among readers who buy piles of books on Gettysburg and D-Day, on campus it’s making a last stand against the shock troops of political correctness. “Pretty soon, it may become virtually impossible to find military-history professors who study war with the aim of understanding why one side won and the other side lost,” says Frederick Kagan, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who taught at West Point for ten years. That’s bad news not only for those with direct ties to this academic sub-discipline, but also for Americans generally, who may find that their collective understanding of past military operations falls short of what the war-torn present demands.
The very first histories ever written were military histories. Herodotus described the Greek wars with Persia, and Thucydides chronicled the Peloponnesian War. “It will be enough for me,” wrote Thucydides nearly 25 centuries ago, “if these words of mine are judged useful by those who want to understand clearly the events which happened in the past and which (human nature being what it is) will, at some time or other and in much the same ways, be repeated in the future.” The Marine Corps certainly thinks Thucydides is useful: He appears on a recommended-reading list for officers. One of the most important lessons he teaches is that war is an aspect of human existence that can’t be wished away, no matter how hard the lotus-eaters try...
Why Military History is Being Retired
9 October edition of National Review - Sounding Taps by John Millier. Hat tip to Prairie Pundit.
Quote:
...Although the keenest students of military history have often been soldiers, the subject isn’t only for them. “I don’t believe it is possible to treat military history as something entirely apart from the general national history,” said Theodore Roosevelt to the American Historical Association in 1912. For most students, that’s how military history was taught — as a key part of a larger narrative. After the Second World War, however, the field boomed as veterans streamed into higher education as both students and professors. A general increase in the size of faculties allowed for new approaches, and the onset of the Cold War kept everybody’s mind focused on the problem of armed conflict.
Then came the Vietnam War and the rise of the tenured radicals. The historians among them saw their field as the academic wing of a “social justice” movement, and they focused their attention on race, sex, and class. “They think you’re supposed to study the kind of social history you want to support, and so women’s history becomes advocacy for ‘women’s rights,’” says Mary Habeck, a military historian at the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Washington, D.C. “This makes them believe military historians are always advocates of militarism.” Other types of historians also came under attack — especially scholars of diplomatic, intellectual, and maritime history — but perhaps none have suffered so many casualties as the “drums and trumpets” crowd. “Military historians have been hunted into extinction by politically active faculty members who think military history is a subject for right-wing, imperialistic warmongers,” says Robert Bruce, a professor at Sam Houston State University in Texas.
At first glance, military history appears to have maintained beachheads on a lot of campuses. Out of 153 universities that award doctorates in history, 99 of them — almost 65 percent — have at least one professor who claims a research interest in war, according to S. Mike Pavelec, a military historian at Hawaii Pacific University. But this figure masks another problem: Social history has started to infiltrate military history, Trojan Horse–style. Rather than examining battles, leaders, and weapons, it looks at the impact of war upon culture. And so classes that are supposedly about the Second World War blow by the Blitzkrieg, the Bismarck, and the Bulge in order to celebrate the proto-feminism of Rosie the Riveter, condemn the national disgrace of Japanese-American internment, and ask that favorite faculty-lounge head-scratcher: Should the United States have dropped the bomb? “It’s becoming harder and harder to find experts in operational military history,” says Dennis Showalter of Colorado College. “All this social history is like Hamlet without the prince of Denmark.” ...