Military Glance
President Barack Obama will name the first woman to head a U.S. combatant command, selecting Air Force General Lori Robinson as the next head of the military's Northern Command, Defense Secretary Ash Carter said on Friday.
The position, which is subject to Senate confirmation, is one of the most senior in the U.S. military and would make Robinson - who now leads U.S. air forces in the Pacific - the top general overseeing activities in North America.
U.S. general Lori Robinson to become first woman to lead combatant command
Bowe Bergdahl's attorney wants to interview Donald Trump
The attorney for Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, facing a court martial on charges of desertion and misbehavior before the enemy, has requested to meet with Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump in a possible attempt to depose him for repeatedly calling Bergdahl a "traitor."
Attorney Franklin D. Rosenblatt wrote to Trump asking for an interview of up to two hours, CNN reported.
"Based on your personal knowledge of matters that are relevant to Sergeant Bergdahl's right to a fair trial, this interview will help us determine whether to seek a deposition order ... or your personal appearance as a witness at an Article 39(a) session of the court-martial," NBC News reported.
US military burn pits built on chemical weapons facilities tied to soldiers' illness
In 2007, shortly after vice-president Joe Biden learned that his eldest son would be deployed to Iraq, the then-presidential hopeful turned to a modest crowd at the Iowa state fair and admitted that he didn’t want Beau to go. “But I tell you what,” he said, his family lined up behind him. “I don’t want my grandson or my granddaughters going back in 15 years and so how we leave makes a big difference.”
Beau arrived in Iraq the following year, and spent the next several months serving as a Jag officer at Camp Victory, just outside of the Baghdad airport, and Joint Base Balad, nearly 40 miles north of Baghdad. Though he returned home safely in September 2009, he woke up one day a few months later with an inexplicable headache, numbness in his limbs and paralysis on one side of his body. Beau had suffered a mild stroke. His health deteriorated, and he was diagnosed with brain cancer. Less than two years later, he died at the age of 46.
How David Petraeus avoided felony charges and possible prison time
Inside a secure conference room on the 6th floor of the Justice Department in early 2014, top federal law enforcement officials gathered to hear what criminal charges prosecutors were contemplating against David H. Petraeus, the storied wartime general and former CIA director whose public career had ended about 15 months earlier over an extramarital affair.
Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. and FBI Director James B. Comey listened as prosecutors did a mock run through the government's case, a preview of how they would present their evidence to Petraeus' lawyers in order, they hoped, to force a guilty plea.
Egregious safety failures at Army lab led to anthrax mistakes
A brigadier general who led an Army biodefense lab in Utah is among a dozen individuals facing potential disciplinary actions — including loss of jobs — for egregious failures that contributed to the facility mistakenly shipping live anthrax to other labs for more than a decade, according to the military’s accountability investigation report that was provided to USA TODAY.
“Over time, you see there is complacency that the leadership should have recognized and taken action to correct,” Maj. Gen. Paul Ostrowski, who led the review team, said in an interview.
Politico: America’s secret arsenal
To this day it remains one of the most sophisticated and mysterious offensive operations ever launched: Stuxnet, the computer virus specifically engineered to attack Iran's nuclear reactors. Discovered in 2010 and now widely believed to be a collaboration between the U.S. and Israel, its existence raised an urgent question: Just what is the U.S. government doing to attack its opponents in the cyber-realm?
Stuxnet's origins have never been officially acknowledged, and the extent of American meddling in malware is still unknown. But for the past few years there’s been something new developing within the U.S. military that has taken "cyber" from a theoretical idea to a deliberate—if secretive—part of U.S. policy.
Pentagon Crew Lived Large in $150 Million Afghan Villas
A Pentagon task force established in 2006 to help lure private businesses first to Iraq and then Afghanistan allegedly blew as much as $150 million on lavish villas in Afghanistan for a few lucky members of its staff—instead of lodging them cheaply, or for free, at the U.S. embassy or any one of numerous large American military bases in the war-torn country.
The alleged waste by the Task Force for Business and Stability Operations, first described in a five-page Nov. 25 letter to U.S. Defense Secretary Ashton Carter from John Sopko, from the military’s special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, or SIGAR, should come as no surprise. TFBSO, as it’s known inside the Pentagon, has long attracted criticism for apparently wasteful spending and other abuses.
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