Ninja & Samurai: intelligence gathering in ancient Asia

You can read part I here. Ancient China and much of Asia saw widespread use of spies and espionage during its turbulent history. In fact, the use of these agents was so common that the final chapter of Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War” (Sunzi Bingfa) is dedicated to spies, spying, and their importance in […]

Help keep Army Special Operations history alive

De Oppresso Liber – To Free the Oppressed Known as the quiet professionals, the Green Berets have been “freeing the oppressed” all over the world, for decades. Their extraordinary contributions in Vietnam alone, serve to remind us of their uniqueness as the ONLY presidentially appointed unit. Now, the Special Forces’ legacy is desperately calling upon […]

A ship captain & World War I: The history behind donuts with holes

Ah, the ubiquitous donut. The guilty pleasure is, at the same time, the most reviled snack by doctors and professional trainers because of its extreme fat content and beloved by people everywhere because, let’s face it, it tastes so damned good. Donuts in some form or another have been around forever. Archaeologists have dug up […]

From the Kryptia to the CIA: A historical view of intelligence gathering

CIA. KGB. MSS. All acronyms that anyone familiar with the intelligence world would know. (For those who may not be familiar, they stand for: Central Intelligence Agency — United States, Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti — Soviet Union/Russia, and the Ministry for State Security — China). They are all well-represented in the modern media. But what about […]

When Special Forces meets entrepreneurship

“How the hell am I going to fill 1,000 sandbags, and how did I get myself into this mess?” I thought. Sometimes life throws curveballs at you and you have to do your best to sit back in the box and hit them the opposite way. In doing so, you can make the most out […]

25 years ago, F-16 pilot Scott O’Grady was rescued in Bosnia

During the early to mid-1990s, Yugoslavia,  a multiethnic state of Serbs, Croats, and Bosnian Muslims was disintegrating and bloody conflict breaking out. Bosnia-Herzegovina was the scene of some of the worst fighting, where nearly 100,000 people were killed, many of them victims of ethnic cleansing. The United States and NATO got involved in 1992, enforcing […]

The 99th Pursuit Squadron of the Tuskegee Airmen

On June 2, 1943, the 99th Pursuit Squadron of the Tuskegee Airmen, flew its first combat mission during World War II, when it strafed the island of Pantelleria off the coast of Italy.  By the war’s end, the 99th, which became known as the “Red Tails” by the distinctive tail markings on its planes, had […]