While I cannot say I look forward to Christmas, I celebrate it, even if less enthusiastically as time passes. Perhaps it’s the “bah humbug factor” that comes with fading eyesight and the other vicissitudes of what is, however—at least for … Continue reading
Thirty years ago, in the wake of the Vietnam War, historian James Clay Thompson warned: the primary lesson learned was that the United States should never again go to war in a former French colony located on the other side … Continue reading
The White House appointed Center for Vision & Values Fellow and Grove City College Professor of History Dr. Earl Tilford to the U.S. Army War College Board of Visitors. The Board is equivalent to a board of trustees and meets … Continue reading
On July 6, 1992, Tory, my fourteen-year old daughter died after a ten year battle with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis. The grief one feels at the loss of a child is indescribable. The natural order is for children to bury their … Continue reading
Devising a strategy appropriate to the war at hand is fundamental to military success. Neither massive firepower nor effusions of heroically-shed blood will redeem a faulty strategy. The big question in the “Global War on Terror” must be, “Is U.S. … Continue reading
Through the first three weeks of May, the Rockridge Institute, a California-based politically progressive think tank, partnered with a coalition of religious organizations to host an online conference on “Values and Building a Movement.” After going to http://www.rockridgeinstitute.org, signing on … Continue reading
For the American radical left the July 23, 2002 “Iraq: Prime Minister’s Meeting” memorandum, dubbed “The Downing Street Memo,” was the “smoking gun” that convicted President George W. Bush of manipulating intelligence to support his decision to go to war … Continue reading
“There is a time for all things: there is even a time for change; and that is when it can no longer be resisted.” – Duke of Cambridge, 1904 The howling started as soon as the Department of Defense released … Continue reading
Thirty years ago Friday, April 29, a North Vietnamese tank crashed through the walls of Saigon’s Presidential Palace to raise a Viet Cong flag over Ho Chi Minh City ending the twenty-year Republic of Vietnam and America’s longest war. This … Continue reading
Early last summer, I was among a dozen American university professors studying terrorism in Israel. On the Sabbath we took a day off to visit the religious sites in Jerusalem. Given the terrorist threat, armed security personnel always accompanied us. … Continue reading
Effective wartime presidents are generalissimos, commanders-in-chiefs wielding military power to achieve historically monumental strategic ends; visionaries who shape and mold events through bold political and military action. Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt, America’s two greatest wartime Presidents, served the … Continue reading
(Download the PDF white paper here.) World War IV, the “Global War on Terror,” like World War II and World War III (the Cold War), is a struggle between competing worldviews which, like the Cold War, could last a long … Continue reading
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s response to a question concerning the lack of proper equipment, “You go to war with the Army you have,” rightly prompted some pointed critiques. While the US Army is the world’s finest ground force, it … Continue reading
In January 1954, in a speech before the New York Council on Foreign Relations, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles articulated the essence of the Eisenhower administration’s national security policy. Dulles warned the Soviet Union and Communist China that future … Continue reading
Forty-four years ago, at the age of thirteen, I became “politically aware” while reading Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater’s “Conscience of a Conservative.” Four years later, as I entered college, Goldwater, accepting the Republican Party’s nomination for president, declared that extremism … Continue reading
Aging boomers nostalgic for those long ago days of anti-war demonstrations and that whiff of tear gas floating across the quad, take heart. On October 14, four Princeton Theological Seminary professors and Assyrian Catholic Church of Iraq peace activist, Sister … Continue reading
Fighting itself will stir up hostile feelings: violence committed on superior orders will stir up the desire for revenge and retaliation against the perpetrator rather than against the powers that ordered the action. – Carl von Clausewitz (On War, Book … Continue reading
President George W. Bush’s recent misstatement that the “War on Terror is unwinnable,” corrected by the President the next day on the Rush Limbaugh Show with an explanation that the war will not end with a surrender ceremony reminiscent of … Continue reading
In his State of the Union Address on January 29, 2002, fourteen months before the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom, President Bush posited an “Axis of Evil” between Iraq, Iran and North Korea. While infiltration of Iranian Hezbollah fighters and … Continue reading
Forty years after we graduated about half the Sheffield High School class of 1964 gathered on a July Saturday night at a local Holiday Inn for our fortieth reunion. Four decades had passed since I left Sheffield, Alabama. Located in … Continue reading
