As you may have noticed there’s a new name on the masthead. Jamie McIntyre’s Line of Departure is morphing into Carl Prine’s Line of Departure.

Nic Robertson launches a direct, and personal attack on Fox News, and its correespondent in Libya, after Fox alleges CNN and other western media were used as “human shields” to protect Moammar Gaddafi’s compound in Tripoli. A fact check.

As one frustrated Air Force acquisition officer complained to me after the last competition, “If Congress wants Boeing to win, why don’t they just scrap this charade about competitive bids, and just vote to award the contract to Boeing?” In essence, that’s what happened. The requirements were rewritten in a way that gave Boeing the edge, and this time the “right” company won. But after years of wasted time and money, we the taxpayers lost.

A landmark lawsuit filed Tuesday against Defense Secretary Robert Gates and his predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld, alleges that the military’s repeated failures to take action in rape cases created a culture where violence against women was tolerated, violating the plaintiffs’ Constitutional rights. Is this an accurate picture of what’s happening today to women in the military?

Is the Super Bowl a “commercial for war?” I thought it was all about beer and boobs. I was taken aback when I heard a sportswriter on my local NPR affiliate go off on how the game is used to promote militarism. here’s a direct quote, from Dave Zarin, “It’s a military procession that that I think would put a lot of thing in Red Square to shame.” Wow, To call that ungrateful is to run the risk of serious understatement.

Clearly it should be no shock that sailors use salty language and like to blow off steam with bawdy, sometimes borderline humor, but what’s at issue here is judgment. That’s what we expect of senior officers in the military. So, should former Top Gun pilot and current skipper of the USS Enterprise, Capt. Owen Honors lose his prestigious assignment as commander of the Enterprise because of his lapse in judgment years ago?

I totally get why having two manufacturers make two different engines for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter makes so much sense. Oh sure, the Pentagon and all the military services say they don’t want or need an extra engine that they can’t afford, but really, what do they know? Blah, Blah, Blah…

The Air Force’s ham-fisted action comes across as both ineffective, and to some degree clueless. You might as hang a banner with the slogan: “U.S. Air Force: We Don’t Get It!”

If there is a bad guy here, it’s the leaker not the leakees, and Pfc. Manning stands accused of being that bad guy. He has yet to go to trial, but the Berkeley commission — the same commission that declared the Marine Corps “unwanted intruders” in Berkeley in 2008 — wants to thank Manning “for his courage in bringing the truth to the American people and the people of the world.”

Whether there’s an appeal or not, the congressionally-mandated discrimination against homosexuals is going to end. Most of the country, and most of the military for that matter, has moved on. There may be an injunction issued. Congress may or may not act. But the writing is on the wall.