Best Defense

Thomas E. Ricks' daily take on national security.

Wanat: It’s back

The new issue of Vanity Fair has a good overview piece by Mark “Black Hawk Down” Bowden about the Wanat battle and its effect on those who fought it, oversaw it and questioned it. Here’s a link to the article. Meanwhile, Rand Corporation surfaces with a report on what Wanat might tell us about small ...

U.S. Department of Defense
U.S. Department of Defense
U.S. Department of Defense

The new issue of Vanity Fair has a good overview piece by Mark “Black Hawk Down” Bowden about the Wanat battle and its effect on those who fought it, oversaw it and questioned it. Here’s a link to the article.

Meanwhile, Rand Corporation surfaces with a report on what Wanat might tell us about small unit operations in Afghanistan. I gave it a skim and can’t tell what, if anything, to make of it. I don’t want to keep on beating up on poor Rand, but I find their reports tend to be mushy. I read so much stuff that I want people to get to their essential points clearly, quickly and emphatically — as Col. Creighton Abrams did in an Army War College paper that I was reading yesterday in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. More on that later.

Thomas E. Ricks covered the U.S. military from 1991 to 2008 for the Wall Street Journal and then the Washington Post. He can be reached at ricksblogcomment@gmail.com. Twitter: @tomricks1

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