Ukraine has the simple and horrible problem of geography. Strictly speaking, it's not a strategic mistake as much as it is just an uncomfortable fact. If you wander through history you will find that countries without hard borders - a nasty mountain range, a raging river, perhaps an ocean - always have troubles with neighbors.

The attempted assassination of former President Trump has now had a chance to settle in just a bit, and in capitals around the world I would suspect that there are senior planning teams taking out their portfolios and looking at their assumptions.

We are 120 weeks into the war in Ukraine, a peace conference begins in a week in Switzerland (at which only one side is represented), and the war continues to evolve.

May 19 marked one hundred years since the passing of a great Jewish scholar and poet, Abraham Elijah Kaplan (1891-1924). His father had been a celebrated scholar, who had passed away in his 30s, leaving young Abraham fatherless. His father’s best friends was Rabbi Isser Zalman Meltzer (1870-1953), who saw to it that the son was well educated in the schools of Lithuania. Abraham studied under great Jewish thinkers and by his late 20s and early 30s he had written several beautiful essays in scholarly journals.

Memorial Day is the day we stop and think about the 1,355,000 Soldiers, Sailors, Marines, Airmen, and Coast Guardsmen who have died while in service to the nation. But, one of the things about Memorial Day that always bothers me is that, while the Soldiers and Sailors and Airmen and Marines who died in the major wars are remembered (though even then the focus is on the major battles, not the lesser known ones), the casualties in lesser wars and skirmishes are mostly forgotten and the Sailor or Marine who dies in some skirmish outside of a war is nearly completely forgotten. 

Much of the modern way of war springs from the writings of 4 men from the 1920s: Gen. Giulio Douhet, LtGen. Walther Wever, Marshal Hugh Montague “Boom” Trenchard, and of course, Col. Billy Mitchell.All were believers in “strategic bombing,” the idea that bombing the right targets would destroy morale while also destroying industrial capacity and disabling lines of communication, and drive any nation to surrender.Over the years the theory, particularly in the west, has undergone some modifications

On January 25th, 1942, USS Sargo (SS-186 (under the command of LtCmdr Tyrell Jacobs)) pulled into Surabaya, Indonesia after finishing a short war patrol, offloaded her remaining torpedoes, loaded 1 million rounds of small-arms ammunition, and headed to Mindanao, the Philippines to provide some ammunition to the US and the Philippine Armies. She then picked up 24 maintenance specialists from the B-17 wing and evacuated them from the Philippines. Jacobs, after three patrols in which he fired a great many torpedoes but sank no ships, turned over command, and ended the war working on, and significantly improving, US torpedoes.

In the news this week, Alexei Navalny, the dissident Russian politician who was serving 30 years in an Arctic Gulag, died. Navalny was a longtime rival of Tsar Vlad, had campaigned against corruption - Putin’s corruption - and after returning to Russia in 2021, had been found guilty of “extremism” and “fraud” - what were clearly nonsense charges, and sentenced to 30 years in prison. 

by Navy Capt. (Ret) Peter O'Brien We all know that NORAD (The North American Air Defense Command) traces Santa every year. But, here at the...

The cyber world now touches almost every part of our lives and offers great benefits. But it also comes with new vulnerabilities, some of which are not well understood by those not involved in a connected technical field