Phillip Carter

have a confession: I used to be a Republican. And not just a registered Republican, but a fairly active one. I volunteered for the Bush-Quayle advance team in Los Angeles in 1992; I attended the Republican National Convention in Houston as a youth delegate in 1992; and I canvassed neighborhoods for Richard Riordan, the centrist […]

Clearly, the intelligence had been wrong. As the helicopter began to lift, a 32-year-old Navy SEAL named Neil Roberts, perhaps unable to hear that the chopper was trying to take off, “made as if to jump.” It isn’t clear what happened next. A comrade made a frantic grab for Roberts in vain as he slid […]

In Iraq, we failed to do this, despite heroic efforts by U.S. and coalition troops. The newly-elected Iraqi government inherits a country in which assassinations, kidnappings, suicide bombings, pipeline sabotages, and beheadings of foreigners are daily occurrences. For the last eight months, the ranks of the insurgency have been growing faster than those of the […]

Two days later, The New Yorker published a report on Abu Ghraib by Seymour Hersh. Hersh won a Pulitzer Prize in 1970 for his reporting on the U.S. Army’s atrocities in Vietnam; now he had come full circle, documenting the full extent of the abuses at Abu Ghraib and the Army’s initial efforts to investigate […]

But not much is really known about these elite soldiers, who call themselves the “quiet professionals.” Special operations exploits rarely make the headlines except when they succeed or fail spectacularly. Military historians, too, tend to focus on conventional forces and battles. U.S. News & World Report senior writer Linda Robinson helps to fill the resulting […]

Since September 11, the U.S. military has expended an enormous amount of spirit, blood, and treasure on battlefields halfway around the world. In Iraq and Afghanistan, 979 of our soldiers have been killed; and another 5,600 wounded. More than a quarter of a million young men and women have been exposed to the horrors of […]

But the hawks’ gloating proved premature. The generals’ argument had never been just about what forces it would take to decapitate Saddam’s regime. It was also about being ready for the long, grinding challenge after the shooting stopped. By that measure they have been proven dizzyingly correct. April and May brought daily news reports from […]

It’s easy to understand how superior information helped U.S. forces succeed in, say, the Gulf War or in Kosovo. But as Berkowitz explains, information was also a key factor for forces like the Mogadishu mob that fought the U.S. Army in Somalia in 1993. It relied on a network of cellular phones and burning tires […]

Last February, as the sun rose over a parched California desert, tanks from the 4th Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade reached a large enemy minefield. Their orders were to secure a hilltop in the enemy’s rear area. But until combat engineers could clear a path, the tanks would be sitting ducks for nearby tank and artillery […]