Free Republic

But sentry duty at Annapolis has been a 155-year tradition for Marines. Naval tradition is the lifeblood of the Corps, and I believed – until my former Marine Corps commandant disabused me of that belief – that to remove Marines from the guard posts at Annapolis would somehow lessen the potency of that lifeblood. Other Marines I’ve spoken to have felt similarly.

Opponents of the war say the only Al Qaeda elements in Iraq prior to the U.S. invasion were those in Kurdish areas not controlled by Saddam. This simply is not so, but for the sake of argument, let’s say it is. And if so, would not the U.S. – as a critical front in the global war on terror – have to invade those areas to shut down the Al Qaeda cells? Of course. And that in itself would have been a far more dangerous “limited war” with Iraq involving a direct ground confrontation with Saddam’s army anyway.

Pirates, just like land-lubbing bank-robbers and jewel thieves, probably will always be with us. The question is how to counter them and their increasing sophistication, and how to prevent them from coordinating efforts with terrorist networks like Al Qaeda. The answer to the latter is simply good intelligence: human, signals, open-source, and otherwise. In terms of shipboard counter-pirate operations, the answers lie in effective training of security personnel and high-tech ingenuity.

"This is the beginning of the war!" a French Muslim boy called out in the middle of the riots in Le Blanc Mesnil, just north of Paris. But is it? Or was the war really going on already? Few Americans have heard of him, but in Europe, more and more are becoming familiar with the name – and the ideas – of Dyab Abou Jahjah, founder of the now-international Arab European League (AEL) and the Muslim Democratic Party. Handsome, charismatic, well-educated, and multilingual, he has the perfect makings of a political leader, or perhaps better said, a man poised to...

But the true story of Iraq is far different than what some would have the American public believe. It is story of enormous sacrifice, commitment, political, and military success, and a desire for freedom on the part of the Iraqi people that in many ways parallels our own War of Independence, 230 years ago. What about America’s military successes and victories in Iraq? They are in many ways, immeasurable: A reality of the overall global war on terror. What is known is that the war — in Iraq and elsewhere — is being waged and won by the U.S. and...

As bedtime approached, some of the children began to cry, fearful that "the soldiers" were going to come and kill them in their sleep.

For those who have been there, Hell Week is a sleepless, bitter cold, gritty, soaking wet, hell on earth where exhausted candidates – pumped full of antibiotics to ward off a variety of infections – survive on sheer heart, tenacity, seemingly incomprehensible physical courage, and about 5,000-7,000 calories per day (given they can muster enough strength to consume them). Hell Week is a short span of eternity at Coronado, California where the SEAL hopeful comes to a reckoning of the soul. Here, he “realizes,” according to Commander Richard Marcinko (USN, ret.), “the body is only tissue and the mind/brain can...

Admirals, I made a day trip to the Gulf Coast this weekend to visit with and thank our Sailors for the extraordinary work they are doing in the recovery and relief effort. I spent time at the Seabee base in Gulfport, NSA New Orleans and NAS/JRB New Orleans, as well as aboard HARRY S TRUMAN, BATAAN, TORTUGA and IWO JIMA. It was at once both a grim and an incredibly uplifting experience. Some of my impressions:

Brigadier General James H. Schwitters is in many ways the face of leadership in the 21st-century American Army: Thoughtful, deliberate, battle-seasoned, all business, nothing like “the perfumed princes” the late Col. David H. Hackworth railed against for so many years. Schwitters is simply a bone-hard warrior with a calculating mind and far too many parachute jumps (operational and training) under his belt to continue counting. He knows how to fight, survive, achieve the given objective, and think outside of the box to accomplish all three. He’s the kind of general-officer the Army – in fact the entire U.S. Defense Department...

There has been much discussion among the American People of why our military and State Department personnel are deployed in Iraq. While some offer cynical views, mostly for partisan reasons, others are closer to the mark and deserve consideration. There are four main reasons that we are here:

It's one thing to watch the dramatic televised images of last week's terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. It's quite another to wade through the dust, debris, and twisted black shells of three buildings, two of which had come to symbolize the dominant economic power of New York City.

A brand-new Marine Corps special operations force is a project that has been in the conception and experimental stages since the terrorist attacks of 9/11. It became an operational test unit following the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and its official existence is now pending only the signature of U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.