“The US is doing far more than its allies in coming to grips with causing civilian harm,” a human rights NGO representative who has met with Pentagon leaders said. Still, the gap between government estimates and those from groups on the ground is often wide. 

“In our defeat-ISIS activities, we’ve had a struggle and presently continue to struggle with the challenge of open source and publicly available information, and how we leverage that to make it truly useful for the warfighter,” Jospeh Votel, former head of both Special Operations Command and Central Command.

WASHINGTON: The Intelligence Community does not agree with President Trump that North Korea is “no longer a nuclear threat.” We know that because Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats told the Senate Intelligence Community today that Kim Il Sung’s country is “not likely to give up” all its nuclear weapons. Here’s our story two years… Keep reading →

The release of the 2020 defense budget is still over a month away, and it’s already been a wild ride. A look at what has happened, and what might happen next.

Republican Senators erupted in outrage, and there are some indications that Turkey pushed Trump to withdraw support from its traditional foes, the Kurds. The British government issued an equivocal statement, while the Kremlin applauded the move.

  Gen. Joe Dunford, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Staff, spoke last week with a small group of traveling reporters after attending a conference of NATO Military Chiefs in Warsaw, including Breaking Defense contributor James Kitfield. Dunford described Russia’s strategy for pulling NATO apart and reiterated that Moscow poses the single greatest global threat to the UnIted… Keep reading →

“The Russians are really good at this, better than us,” said the UK’s Maj. Gen. Felix Gedney, who just wrapped up a year as deputy commander of Operation Inherent Resolve. “We saw a very clever, assiduous information campaign aimed at discrediting the campaign of the coalition. And I would argue in many of our nation’s capitals, we didn’t realize we were being played.”

U.S. troops in Syria aren’t going anywhere until Iran leaves the country, a senior Trump administration said Monday as Russia deploys an advanced air defense system that puts U.S. and Israeli pilots at greater risk.

No one knows precisely what happened inside the White House that resulted in President Trump’s sudden about-face on Syria. One day he was planning to extricate American ground troops from Syria; then he wasn’t. Regardless, whoever is urging the president to leave a small contingent of 2,000 lightly armed soldiers and Marines in a remote corner of Syria is doing the president and the nation a grave disservice. 

By most metrics the war in Afghanistan is going badly.