The way mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin and his private army have been waging a significant part of Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine has been well covered in the American media, not least of all because his firm, the Wagner Group, draws most of its men from Russia’s prison system. Wagner offers “freedom” from Putin’s labor camps only to send those released convicts to the[Read More…]
Here’s something we seldom focus on when it comes to war, American-style, even during the just-passed 20th anniversary of our disastrous invasion of Iraq: many more soldiers survive armed conflict than die from it. This has been especially so during this country’s twenty-first-century War on Terror, which is still playing out in all too many lands globally. And here’s something to add to that reality: even though[Read More…]
During a Veterans Day celebration in my small Maryland community, a teacher clicked through a slideshow of smiling men and women in military uniforms. “Girls and boys, can anyone tell me what courage is?” she asked the crowd, mostly children from local elementary schools, including my two young kids. A boy raised his hand. “Not being scared?” he asked. The[Read More…]
By any standard, the money the United States government pours into its military is simply overwhelming. Take the $858-billion defense spending authorization that President Biden signed into law last month. Not only did that bill pass in an otherwise riven Senate by a bipartisan majority of 83-11, but this year’s budget increase of 4.3% is the second highest in inflation-adjusted terms since World[Read More…]
The American military is now having trouble recruiting enough soldiers. According to the New York Times, its ranks are short thousands of entry-level troops and it’s on track to face the worst recruitment crisis since the Vietnam War ended, not long after the draft was eliminated. Mind you, it’s not that the military doesn’t have the resources for recruitment drives. Nearly every political figure[Read More…]
Dealing with Trump’s Occupation of All Too Many American Hearts and Minds Increasingly, it seems, Americans have an anger problem. All too many of us now have the urge to use name-calling, violent social-media posts, threats, baseball bats, and guns to do what we once did with persuasion and voting. For example, during the year after Donald Trump entered the Oval Office, threats[Read More…]
Anyone who grew up in my generation of 1980s kids remembers G.I. Joe action figures — those green-uniformed plastic soldiers you could use to stage battles in the sandbox in your backyard or, for that matter, your bedroom. In those days, when imagery of bombed-out homes, bloodied civilians, and police violence wasn’t accessible on TV screens or in video games like Call of[Read More…]
What do a six-year-old in the United States and an 85-year-old in Russia have in common besides being on opposite sides of a war? They’re both feeling the strain of a warming planet. “Is the earth going to get so hot that we can’t survive?” my young son asked me last summer as we plodded through the woods behind our[Read More…]
A relative of mine, who works for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) compiling data on foreigners entering the United States, recently posted a curious logo on his Facebook profile: a white Roman numeral three on a black background surrounded by 13 white stars. For those who don’t know what this symbol stands for, it represents the “Three Percenters,” a[Read More…]
As a Navy spouse of 10 years and counting, my life offers an up-close view of our country’s priorities when it comes to infrastructure and government spending. Recently, my husband, a naval officer currently serving with the Department of Energy, spent a week with colleagues touring a former nuclear testing site about 65 miles north of Las Vegas. Between 1951 and 1957, the U.S.[Read More…]
I know what it means to be watched all too carefully, a phenomenon that’s only grown worse in the war-on-terror years. I’m a strange combination, I suspect, being both a military spouse and an anti-war-on-terror activist. As I’ve discovered, the two sit uncomfortably in what still passes for one life. In this country in these years, having eyes on you[Read More…]
Sometimes, as I consider America’s never-ending wars of this century, I can’t help thinking of those lyrics from the Edwin Starr song, “(War, huh) Yeah! (What is it good for?) Absolutely nothing!” I mean, remind me, what good have those disastrous, failed, still largely ongoing conflicts done for this country? Or for you? Or for me? For years and years,[Read More…]
Given the more than 60 Democratic and Republican votes lined up, the Senate is poised to move forward with a new bill that would change the way the military handles sexual assault and other felony crimes by service members. Sponsored by Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) and Joni Ernst (R-IA), the new law would assign decision-making on sexual-assault cases and a host of other[Read More…]
A Military Spouse’s Perspective on the Pentagon’s Flawed Response to the Pandemic Herd immunity? Don’t count on it. Not if that “herd” is the U.S. military. According to news reports, at least a third of active-duty military personnel or those in the National Guard have opted out of getting the coronavirus vaccine. That figure, by the way, doesn’t even include American[Read More…]
Perspectives on the Storming of the Capitol from a Military Spouse “Are you okay?” asked a friend and military spouse in the voicemail she left me on the afternoon the mob of Trump supporters breached the Capitol so violently. At home with a new baby, her Navy reservist husband stationed in Germany, the thoughts running through her head that day[Read More…]
The Massive and Unseen Costs of America’s Post-9/11 Wars at Home and Abroad “I got out of the Marines and within a few years, 15 of my buddies had killed themselves,” one veteran rifleman who served two tours in both Afghanistan and Iraq between 2003 and 2011 said to me recently. “One minute they belonged and the next, they were[Read More…]
A Military Spouse’s Perspective on Bringing the Troops Home from Afghanistan and Iraq By the end of this year, the White House will reportedly have finally brought home a third of the 7,500 troops still stationed in Afghanistan and Iraq (against the advice of President Trump’s own military leaders). While there have been stories galore about the global security implications of this plan, there has[Read More…]
It was July 2017, a few weeks before the “Unite the Right” Charlottesville riots, when white men marched through the streets of that Virginia city protesting the planned takedown of a confederate statue and chanting, “Jews will not replace us.” I was sitting at a coffee shop in my quiet town of Poulsbo in Washington State. I had set aside[Read More…]
When it rains, pieces of glass, pottery, and metal rise through the mud in the hills surrounding my Maryland home. The other day, I walked outside barefoot to fetch one of my kid’s shoes and a pottery shard stabbed me in the heel. Nursing a minor infection, I wondered how long that fragment dated back. A neighbor of mine found[Read More…]
A Navy Spouse’s Take on Why We’re Not Getting Better American military personnel are getting sick in significant numbers in the midst of the ongoing pandemic. As The New York Times reported in a piece buried in the back pages of its July 21st edition, “The infection rate in the services has tripled over the past six weeks as the United States military has[Read More…]
Recently, in this Black Lives Matter protest moment, my five-year-old son looked at me and asked, “Mommy, where did all the brown people go? Did the police here shoot them?” We’d just moved to the outskirts of a more affluent rural town from a city where my son and three-and-a-half-year-old daughter mixed daily with black, Latino, and Asian American kids[Read More…]
A Military Spouse’s Perspective on Fighting This Pandemic “When he first came home, it was tough.” So Aleha, the wife of an airman in Colorado, told me. She was describing her family’s life since her husband, who lives with chronic depression, completed a partial hospitalization program and, in March, along with other members of his unit, entered a pandemic lockdown. He[Read More…]
As each of my husband’s Navy submarine deployments came to an end, local spouses would e-mail me about the ship’s uncertain date of return. They were attempting to sell tickets to a raffle in which the winner would be the first to kiss her returning sailor. When the time came, journalists would hover to capture the image as hundreds[Read More…]
Last month, as hundreds of thousands of people showed up for the Women’s March in Washington, D.C., a few miles from my home, I was at a karate dojo testing for my first belt. My fellow practitioners, ranging in age from five into their seventies, looked on as I hammered my fist through a two-inch piece of wood. The words of one[Read More…]
One day in October 2001, shortly after the U.S. invaded Afghanistan, I stood at the front of a private high school classroom. As a new social studies teacher, I had been tasked with describing violence against women in that country. I showed the students an article from the front page of the New York Times featuring Afghan women casting off their burqas as[Read More…]
There is some incongruity between my role as an editor of a book about the costs of America’s wars and my identity as a military spouse. I’m deeply disturbed at the scale of human suffering caused by those conflicts and yet I’ve unintentionally contributed to the war effort through the life I’ve chosen. I am the co-editor with Catherine Lutz[Read More…]
Mexico’s Zapatistas Warn Chiapas Is on “the Verge of Civil War” 
Why distress from railway accidents may be much higher than is commonly believed 
Stop Plastic Pollution as We Commemorate 50th World Environment Day 2023 
Modi Regime should be Called to Account for the Deadliest Triple Train Collision at Balasore 
Thoughts on World Environment Day 
Nuclear Fusion: Eternal Energy = Eternal Damnation 
Why There Should Be A Treaty Against the Use of Weaponized Drones 
Protests in Germany after Anti-fascists sent to five years in prison 
Women Wrestler’s Protests: Exposing Beti Bachao Slogan 
Inauguration of Parliament Building: Coronation Ceremony? 
FBI appears to be continuing investigation of Julian Assange 
And We Are Much More Than Our Uterus. (In Solidarity With the protesting wrestlers) 
Strike ends in Belsonika with reinstatement of 10 suspended workers 
A Man Without a Strategy: How Netanyahu Is Provoking Armed Intifada in the West Bank 
The Ancient Patterns of Migration 
Seven Reasons Why the Present Phase of Imperialism is the Most Dangerous Ever 
Unmasking Tourism’s Roadblocks 
Metro authorities humiliating ordinary commuters 
PLI Scheme- Do subsidies to profit-earning private manufacturers yield commensurate societal benefits? World Environment Day in India: Doing Justice with the Day 
Ben Roberts-Smith: The Breaking of a Plaster Saint 
Do we All need Religion? An Introspection 
Obama, Kissinger and the Nobel Peace Prize 
The Politics of Erdogan and Western Anxieties 
The Compulsion to Intervene – Why Washington Underwrites Violence in Ukraine 
Just War and Just War Theory 
Stolen Heirloom or poppycock 
‘Simply Inconceivable’ to Dump Fukushima Water in Pacific, Critics Say After Latest IAEA Report 
Eradicate Dowry, Eliminate Dowry Violence 
Growing number of elderly homeless in the US 
Rise Up in Solidarity with Protesting Wrestlers 
Plastic Pollution in Destinations: A Growing Threat to Environmental Sustainability 
The US Censors Dissenting Voices: On the Attacks Against the Midwestern Marx Institute 
The US Government Should At Least Listen to this Wisdom of its Top Experts on the Ukraine Crisis 
Indigenous Australians & Palestinians: Treaty, Truth, Voice, Referendum & Senator Lidia Thorpe 
Kya Sharmsaar hai hindustan……are wrestling champions of India going the Mohammed Ali way? 
Legislative Gaps Helping Overseas Shell Companies? 
Book Review: Marginalised but not Defeated 
When Will US Join Global Call to End Ukraine War? 
AUKUS, Congress and Cold Feet 
Our beloved K.P.Sasi is no more. Filmmaker, cartoonist, writer, mentor, friend and above all tireless activist championing the cause of every underdog, Sasi breathed his last, mid-afternoon this Christmas day – after battling a medical condition for months. I remember the last time I met him, almost exactly a month before he passed away, at the ayurvedic healing center in[Read More…]
