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I'll admit that when *I* was a candidate for the foreign service, John Quincy Adams was Secretary of State.

Just for the record, I passed the written and oral exams but failed my physical because...

I don't know if it's changed, but when I was looking at the Foreign Service, they had 20K people a year take the written test, 2K pass that, 400 pass the oral exam, and about 200 get offers. They...

Not exactly true--that's exactly what the regional centers like the Marshall Center and the Africa Center for Strategic Studies do. They realized that for civilian control of the military to work,...

The training by the U.S. does as much as possible to reinforce respect for human rights, civilian control of the military etc. No doubt people trained by the U.S. commit abuses. What I was taking...

I must add that anthropologists may today's masters of 1960s intellectual leftist silliness, but they don't have a monopoly. I was at an AFRICOM conference at the Pentagon Doubletree yesterday...

Get some peers who opted NOT to go to college and compare career prospects with them. Then maybe your situation won't seem so glum. (My father was a plumber and my grandfathers were a truck driver...

Well, for those who grew up in the Southwest, there was a ritual involving a case of beer, a trip to Tijuana, a spooky hotel room, and a donkey.

That's the exact reason that I argued in Rethinking Insurgency that women's empowerment should be a central component of counterinsurgency. If you look at inner city gangs you see that it's not JUST...

Thing is--and this is a point I tried to make in my Rethinking Insurgency monograph--they have to be constructive options that appeal to a 19 year old. The Bush strategy of allowing people to vote...

I think you've touched on a key security issues that is seldom analyzed in any rigorous way: how does a society channel off and control the aggression of young males? This sounds glib but I'm...

Having a kid who is a college sophmore and one who is in the application profess right now, I've taken 17 college visits over the past 24 months, I too feel that vast improvements have been made in...

We'll agree to disagree. I think the only "flaw" Price has pointed out is that the manual isn't an academic document. I think that's about as valid as me critiquing one of Price's articles because...

I'm a bit skeptical of the ability of IO professionals to alter a lifetime of acculturation.

But, of course, every culture, including our own, has a mythological version of its own past. I've...

Hey--I found Napoleon Dynamite rife with existential pathos.

http://www.ugo.com/versus/images/characters/gallery_Napoleon_Dynamite_1.jpg

Rigorous critique is fine. "It doesn't have enough citations" does not constitute a rigorous critique. Ideological potshots at American involvement in Iraq do not constitute rigorous critique.

I take your overall point but I sure wouldn't use the word "understanding" to describe the accepted view of history in the Arab world (or many other places as well, such as the Balkans). It's more...

Very thoughtful post. Having lived at the intersection of academia and the military for 20 years, though, I personally think there is less hostility toward academia in the military than there is...

As long as my dander is up and I'm in mid-rant, let me throw out another point. While some trained anthropologist who consult with the government undoubtedly do so because they believe in the cause,...

I take your point that some anthropologists prefer to remain "scientists" rather than undertake praxis, but what annoys me is their aggression in attempting to delegitimize anthropologists who see...

Well, perhaps the word "hypocritical" would have been more appropriate.

The bigger point is this old, stale idea that all of the evil in the world comes from Western repression. The AAA's...

Personally, I think you're being too kind to them. I find the "resolution" morally repulsive.

By "this war" it is not clear whether the esteemed scholars mean Iraq, Afghanistan, or both. I assume...

Here's the message I would send to the AAA if I knew how to get a communication to the alternative universe they apparently inhabit: all wars are a "denial of human rights and [are] based on faulty...

Just so I understand, we're just talking about that one chapter and not the whole manual?

As someone who was sort of at the periphery of the 3-24 development process, I think you greatly overestimate the role of Dave and John. Ultimately the manual reflects the judgement of the flag...

I just don't seem to be getting my point across. In a doctrine manual, the overwhelming majority of the information is derived from professional experience, not from some other published sources. ...