Generals, the time has come for you to honestly share with your troops the metrics culled from the war in Afghanistan. What is your strategy? How long will it take? Where are we now? What are the costs?

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!”

Not to be outdone by Julian Assange, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is “threatening,” or — more accurately — promising to dump hundreds of once-secret government documents onto his web site, to shed new light on his six years as Pentagon chief.

You gotta admire the ability of Defense Secretary Bob Gates to look at ugly situations in the clear light of day, and distill them down to their essential facts.  No one has been more clear about the real implications of the WikiLeaks than Gates, whose explanation of the ramifications stands as one the of great […]

The great disservice that WikiLeaks has done is to completely demolish the notion that journalists can act responsibly, and with restraint, when it comes to protecting U.S. national interests. But that’s also in part because the internet has demolished all national boundaries when it comes to information sharing.

Whatever your takeaway from however many documents you’ve actually read, here’s what they are NOT: another Pentagon Papers. As the Washington Post put it “WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange … has offered abundant evidence that there is no secret history of Iraq or Afghanistan.”

Let’s be clear: WikiLeaks is an anti-privacy, anti-secrecy group, whose primary tenet is that nothing should be kept from the world, not military secrets, not sources or methods of intelligence gathering, not even the secret rituals of fraternities and sororities. WikiLeaks seems to me to to be functioning less in the tradition of good old-fashioned muckrakers, and more like anti-privacy terrorists.

If the Reuters photographer was shooting the war from the insurgents’ perspective, he was taking his life in his hands, and he paid dearly for it. Read the investigation, before condemning this as an act of “collateral murder.”

Mistakes in war (and in journalism for that matter) are often made because someone becomes convinced early on of one explanation for events, and then disregards all evidence to the contrary. Sometimes they don’t see the alternate possibilities right in front of them because they are so fixated on their initial perception of reality.