Category: Featured

The Marine Corps Jungle Warfare Training Center in Okinawa Japan had to be one of my favorite deployments. Learning how to operate and survive in a jungle environment is vastly different than a desert or woodland environment. There are also threats native to the jungle that you must be aware of. I remember attending a […]

You had military units that rarely left their bases, and CIA support people who didn’t know where their operations officers were deployed.

It was August 15, 2012, when Jeremy Maddamma left Afghanistan on a stretcher. Maddamma, a US Air Force pararescueman, was on a mission to rescue Afghan civilians after multiple suicide bombers hit Zaranj, a city on the Iranian border. He remembers the gunshot puncturing his left knee and falling to the ground. He remembers begging for […]

Falah sabar heard a knock at the door. It was just before midnight in western Baghdad last April and Falah was already in bed, so he sent his son Wissam to answer. Standing in the doorway was a tall young man in jeans who neither shook Wissam’s hand nor offered a greeting. “We don’t want you […]

Soft robots that can grasp delicate objects, computer algorithms designed to spot an “insider threat,” and artificial intelligence that will sift through large data sets — these are just a few of the technologies being pursued by companies with investment from In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital firm, according to a document obtained by The Intercept. Yet among the 38 […]

“I was on my way to play football with my friends when the airstrike hit,” Amin Ali al-Wisabi told VICE News, recounting the day when a CIA drone struck his hometown of Azzan in Yemen. “We had stopped to sit down and plan the match when all of a sudden an explosion hit a passing […]

In January of this year, an internal ISIS memorandum on the group’s finances was leaked to the public. In it, ISIS revealed it was cutting the pay of its soldiers substantially. In 2015, ISIS’s fighters were being paid between $400 and $1,200 per month, depending on their seniority and their job. The leaked memo said ISIS […]

A former physician assistant is accused of using his position to commit sexual battery and other crimes against at least seven patients at a Veterans Affairs hospital in Kansas, and a lawyer says yet more victims will emerge. At least three lawsuits filed in recent weeks in U.S. District Court in Kansas accuse Mark Wisner […]

After successfully completing RIP (Ranger Indoctrination Program later renamed RASP) I was assigned to 2nd Ranger Battalion (Cco-MadSlashers). When I arrived at Ft. Lewis it was basically empty. I was sent on a reach-back bird (planes that carry people into, and out of combat for various reasons) to meet my already deployed platoon. After a […]

Automatic weapons changed the history of warfare, and the AK-47 changed the history of automatic weapons. As detailed in C.J. Chivers’ terrific history of the subject, The Gun, the AK’s durability, consistency, and price allowed for a democratization of violence across the globe. The Kalashnikov is on the flag of Mozambique. There’s a giant statue of one in Egypt. When the Russian financial system […]

Following the terrorist attacks in Paris in November and in Brussels in March, the business world—in search of the financial fallout—swiveled its collective head to the aviation and hotel sectors, where the cities’ immediate shutdown and fears of follow-up incidents moved the market. But as they report their results this earnings season—some five months after the Paris attacks—luxury […]

Iraqi Kurdistan’s fight against ISIS has for many Kurds been an existential battle central to their survival and that of their autonomous region in Iraq. However, with ISIS prevented from embarking upon Kurdistan’s major towns and cities, thanks to the efforts of the Kurdish Peshmerga forces and the U.S.-led military coalition against the jihadists, the […]