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Veterans Day, 2017

December 4, 2017

This column is dedicated to all who have served in the military, or, for that matter, all who are now serving and will one day become veterans. It is a time to remember not those who have died in service — celebrated on Memorial Day — but recognize those still living. In my family, at […]

Watching the Vietnam War, Redux

November 29, 2017

I can remember watching Walter Cronkite on the nightly CBS news reporting on the Vietnam War, probably from 1968, the summer it seems that the world was crashing around our shoulders. The Tet Offensive launched by the North Vietnamese and their allies the Vietcong in the South was underway and all South Viet Nam appeared […]

Memorial Day, 2016

May 30, 2016

Memorial Day started out as Decoration Day among the families of Civil War soldiers who died in that war. The graves of the dead were decorated and their service recalled. Over the years Memorial Day, which in the early years actually had a day devoted to the Union dead and a separate one to those […]

In Service

November 9, 2015

I always try not to get into the “well, things were a lot better when I was growing up, or in college, or…” and you fill in the blank. This generational gap between my age—ahead of the Baby Boomers—and my youngest child’s cohort, the Millennials—often leads one to conclude that one generation—mine of course—was a […]

What Happened to our Citizen Army?

December 14, 2011

Our modern army is quite efficient as an all-volunteer, professional fighting force. But let me suggest that that is not the central, or even the principal, role of the Army in our society and throughout our history. By “Army,” I am writing of all the armed forces, but the Army is the biggest and the […]

A Professional Army and Why We Don’t Care

January 8, 2010

Universal conscription is the only way we are going to win the war.