Military journalism roundup: Recently, Army magazine has surged ahead

While Tom Ricks is away from his blog, he has selected a few of his favorite posts to re-run. We will be posting a few every day until he returns. This originally ran on September 15, 2010.

I am finding Army magazine over the last couple of years much better than in the past, consistently running relevant, thoughtful articles like the two I have highlighted in the last couple of days. I think Army has surpassed the Marine Corps Gazette and is giving Proceedings a run for the money as the most interesting and relevant of the services’ glossy professional magazines.

Meanwhile, speaking of the U.S. Army and publications, whatever happened to Parameters? And has Military Review just gone stupid? It apparently is being edited by people who haven’t read the last several years of its own articles — witness this straw man article written by someone who seems to think that the COIN campaign in Iraq in 2007-08 didn’t have an extremely lethal element.

I frequently am interested by stuff in Joint Force Quarterly and Prism, but they are too new to have established records, and JFQ especially seems to have its ups and downs — witness a goofy, uninformed article on military dissent in the new issue. (And a misspelled name, too.) And it has been years since I’ve read anything really new in the Naval War College Review or in anything published by the Air Force, with the exception of a volume of war poems and stories collected by some faculty members at the Air Force Academy. 

The great photo above came from Army magazine, taken by the hard-working Dennis Steele. I used to run into him at United Air’s international departure gates at Dulles Airport.

"Hey, Dennis, coming or going?"

"Going."

"Iraq or Afghanistan?"

"Both."

And off he would trudge under his bags of cameras.

Dennis Steele, ARMY magazine