Category: Military History

Like all Americans, my wife and I watched with horror as the news came about the mass shooting in Orlando by an ISIS-inspired fanatic.  It made me realize how Douglas MacArthur, one of America’s greatest military leaders and the subject of the biography I just published, is more relevant than ever for understanding our age. […]

In the summer of 1916, a young Oxford academic embarked for France as a second lieutenant in the British Expeditionary Force. The Great War, as World War I was known, was only half-done, but already its industrial carnage had no parallel in European history. “Junior officers were being killed off, a dozen a minute,” recalled J. […]

As for the Delta Force operators, they slipped back into the shadows, more than happy to let others publicly claim credit while their own role remained unacknowledged in the press.

Russia and its nukes and chemical weapons “a brand new problem in those days – brand new to history, really, requiring new thought,” Carter said.

We were doing something that was exciting and important. We’re going to also do something very important for national security. We are going to go look behind the Iron Curtain … defend the nation while doing the exciting things of manned spaceflight.

A bill making its way through the U.S. Congress is seeking to bestow Congressional Gold Medal status on the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the World War II predecessor to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM).  On June 13, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 69 creating […]

During WWII, as the Imperial Japanese suicide pilots boarded their aircraft, they were told that they were honorable and were to be reward . . . While American service-members provided these pilots with a more realistic title – Baka, Japanese for “fool” or “idiot.”

The WP-18 can be fitted out with a retractable remote weapons mount with a 30mm cannon. Uniquely for this type of craft, small SAM or SSM launchers in the bow. Two retractable Rheinmetall ROSY (Rapid Obscuring System) soft-kill systems are also carried in the bow. A retractable EO mast is also fitted.

How much of Marcus Luttrell’s “Lone Survivor is fact, and how much is fiction?

Norris refused to abandon the downed pilots, even after initial failure, and went behind enemy lines over and over again, using daring, subterfuge, and ingenuity to execute his mission.

The Second Auxiliary Surgical Group arrived in Northern Africa shortly behind the invading force of Operation Torch during World War II. They were a group of surgical teams without nurses and without a headquarters, and therefore without consistent direction or organization. Paul A. Kennedy, M.D., a surgeon in a mobile general surgical team, was by turns […]

The United States faces daunting international challenges. Uncertain strategic objectives, questionable alliances, and fuzzy policy goals make it seem as though we are spread too thin everywhere to be effective anywhere. It seems that this is new to our times—that our challenges were much simpler in other eras—but during the chaotic years of World War […]