The news about US troops engaging in Syria has been pretty low-key. Probably because, you know, it exposes some government lies about the degree to which the military is/was going to get involved in the fighting in the area.
Warning: war and death
The US has committed unknown numbers of ground troops into Syria,[stderr] and has placed them in position between Turkish and ISIS forces near Manbij to act as some sort of buffer zone.
US Troops in ground war in Syria.
She was the first Soviet citizen to be welcomed to the White House. There are pictures of her, smiling with Eleanor Roosevelt, in her Red Army dress uniform; the uniform is simple, not a beribboned affair, but one of the medals on her left chest is the plain star of the Hero Of The Soviet Union.
Bacevich asks the question, “Where is the strategy?”
A nation priding itself on having the world’s greatest military – and we do – unquestionably have the world’s greatest military – has misused its military power on an epic scale. It’s not simply that we have not prevailed, although obviously we have not prevailed, rather it is that through a combination of naivete, short-sightedness, and hubris we have actually made matters worse. (10:17)
Trump wants to bump defense spending another 10%.[wp]
Military ‘exercises’ are a form of imperial messaging. Right now, the US has troops in Poland in what is being described with Orwellian irony as “anti-Russian aggression NATO exercises”[1]
The troops will rotate training in Bulgaria, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania and Slovakia for the next nine months. The regional training exercises are also designed to test how U.S. forces respond on short notice to a possible conflict with Russia.
Some of the servicemen hurt/killed in Yemen during the special forces raid were heroically wounded by their own airplane, a CV-22 Osprey.[fox]
One reason the Military/Industrial/Congressional Complex* does the stupid things it does, is because it’s able to keep its mistakes secret. If you really want to lose track of $600 billion, like the pentagon has, the best way to do it is to classify the research, then lose the paper-work.
As you can probably guess, I get a lot of emails related to whatever’s going on in the security world. There was a very short buzz around the “Russia Hacking” thing but very few security practitioners care about it at all. Except one, who sent me this: