Tag: military

“Every great magic trick consists of three parts or acts. The first part is called “The Pledge.” The magician shows you something ordinary: a deck of cards, a bird or a man. He shows you this object. Perhaps he asks you to inspect it to see if it is indeed real, unaltered, normal. But of […]

The publishing industry is experiencing a massive transformation right now. Traditional booksellers and publishers find themselves continually marginalized by not adapting to the digital age of “on-demand” publishing. This disruption and tightening of the digital noose on the neck of traditional publishing houses have also caused most publishers to take fewer risks on new authors. […]

We’ve had the privilege to be able to sit down with a number of veterans who have represented our country and the veteran community well. Too often it seems, that only the negative side of the veteran community gets attention these days, while the vast majority is doing tremendous work both in uniform and when […]

The use of soft power in foreign policy is often aided by the knowledge that should it not be effective, military (hard) power is waiting in the wings. Following this argument, it seems logical to conclude then that when boots are on the ground, soft power has come up short. The military’s mission is to […]

So, there we were. It was late winter and we were doing helicopter insert/extract training, known as helocasting, in the Chesapeake Bay in Virginia. The water was somewhere around 45 degrees. It was cold enough that we were wearing our dry suits instead of wet suits. The dry suits we wore were essentially onesies, with […]

First off, let me preface this article with the fact that I definitely don’t think I’m some gift from God that has come down from the heavens to judge others and act like I know everything. I do feel very fortunate and lucky to have accomplished and experienced the things that I have so far […]

I don’t know why there is such an adversarial relationship between Special Forces and the MP community or when it started. No doubt it was from the earliest days of the O.S.S. when our earliest operators had to return to the flagpole and some guy couldn’t help but try to bust his chops over some […]

There is a certain culture found in the special operations community. These guys are considered to be some of the toughest, strongest, smartest, and most capable individuals in the U.S. military. It is common knowledge that if you need to make a bad guy disappear or to rescue someone from a hostile environment, that one […]

Note: This is part three of a multi-part series exploring the various units within the U.K. Special Forces (UKSF). The Special Boat Service (SBS), one of the oldest Special Forces regiments, is the U.K.’s premier naval counter-terrorism unit (CT). The unit is tasked with addressing assaults on U.K.’s maritime interests. Over the years the SBS […]

On Sunday, eight rockets slammed into an airbase in Balad, Iraq, wounding an Iraqi air force officer and three Iraqi enlisted men. Although the Americans have used that base for training and operations, no Americans were injured and few were even present at the time of this latest attack.  No one has claimed responsibility for […]

Note: This is part two of a multi-part series exploring the various units within the U.K. Special Forces (UKSF). The United Kingdom’s prolonged involvement in the Global War on Terror (GWOT) has created the demand for an increase in the country’s number of special forces operators. From that need emerged the United Kingdom’s newest special […]

This is the first part of a multi-part series exploring the various units within the U.K. Special Forces (UKSF). The Special Air Service (SAS) is widely recognized the world over and is often erroneously considered the only special operations unit Britain has. This couldn’t be further from the truth. In this series, we’ll cover the […]