Search:

Field Marshal Sir JMA is hereby invested with the Order of the Garter and shall hereby be known, by All Ye present, by the following commission that is thus hereby endowed:

"By the Grace of...

The problem isn't the ease with which Gaddafi could be toppled but what comes afterwards. Basic issues like clean drinking water, food and electricity could lead to an extended stay for Western...

Armed forces are blunt instruments that kill people and break things, they're not social service organizations that can go overseas and cure all the evils in the world. It's unrealistic to expect...

Oh well, the following was from before Ken was a Corporal ...

Redlegs are so much more cerebral -- "Lending dignity to what would otherwise be a vulgar brawl." (That saying first belonged to the British cavalry, but we done stoled it from 'em in 1917-18.)

When I mentioned Hungary in this thread on March 5th I was usurping one of Ken's traditional roles on the forum, in this case as its institutional memory. Hungary in 1956 was a case where domestic...

I believe I was the first one to mention Hungary in this thread and that was more than a month ago. "Defending Freedom" in the abstract and starting World War III are two different kettles of fish...

If I recall correctly the Gloustershire Regiment received a Presidential Unit Citation for an epic stand it made in Korea. A retired U.S. Army field grade told me that the Brit battalions on his...

That's somewhat unclear. Could you expand on that or rephrase it a bit?

I like Europeans and a grandfather of mine was British, a 17th London veteran of 1915-19, so please take what I'm saying in that friendly context. American spending and leadership in things military...

If we could put an end to the separation of powers within the U.S. Government we might indeed have a more efficent foreign policy and military strategy overseas. Who knows, we might even win a few...

JMA, you have real-world combat experience when it comes to light and air-mobile infantry operations. In that regard you truly enrich the quality of discussion on the forum. Your expertise on those...

It's the snap moral judgements that everyone in the U.S. or U.K. involved in any given situation must be seriously lacking in ethics, integrity and professionalism that drive me up the wall. It...

That sounds like my Mitsubishi. If anyone wants a good deal I've got a car for you.

(From those great guys who brought us Pearl Harbor.)

After 9/11 there was a lot of talk about "draining the swamp" that breeds terrorism in the Middle East and Central Asia. In that sense the recent uprisings in Libya and other Islamic countries...

From the time this intervention began I've had a very ambivalent feeling about it. I thought we wanted to get out of our entanglements in the Islamic world, not get involved in more of them. For...

I hope that when I grow up I'll know everything there is to know about military affairs the way JMA does. I was never in a war and my service in the post-Vietnam "Hollow Army" apparently don't count...

President Wilson was the first to state a comprehensive list of principles that guided U.S. foreign policy. I'm also aware of his previous interventions in Mexico, but it should be emphasized that...

It was Wilson who announced his Fourteen Points in January 1918 as the basis for a peace settlement to end the First World War. They weren't as much a set of principles that justified intervention...

True, but it doesn't prevent "moral" nations from suffering consequences when they do ill-advised or stupid things. The world isn't moral or immoral, it just is what it is.

Regrettably the budget for the U.S. Grammar and Spelling Police has been cut by the recent squabbles on Capitol Hill, so for now we have to lay low and keep a low profile. However, we haven't gone...

These calls for intervention in Libya bring to mind Colin Powell's comment to President Bush about the Pottery Barn before we went into Iraq -- "If you break it you own it."

In addition to them are the old NCOs, and they'll cut you no slack if they think you're up to something ...

Oh well, I never claimed that spending five minutes reading a newspaper story 20 years ago about the subject made me an expert on it. There are a lot of smart people on this forum so I hesitate to...

Up to a point the alternate specialty concept makes sense for Army officers who aren't selected for battalion command. Non-selection pretty much means the end of being considered for positions in...