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Increasingly there exist two societies in America: a military class, strongly religious, politically conservative, drawn disproportionately from the South and from smaller towns and areas of limited economic opportunity, including the inner cities; and an untouched civilian class consisting of everyone else, who wouldn’t know a regiment from a firmament or an M16 from a […]

Shortwave radio aficionados developed various hypotheses about the role of the station in Russia’s sprawling, military-communications network. It was a forgotten node, one theory ran, set up to serve some function now lost deep in the bureaucracy. It was a top-secret signal, others believed, that transmitted messages to Russian spies in foreign countries. More ominously, […]

(Fiction) I didn’t hear that Duncan Pratt had been killed until I’d been out of the Army for two weeks and had gone four days without a single thought about that final year in Vietnam. If the phone had been disconnected on time, I would never have heard at all. A mutual buddy from military […]

For all its recent success, Huawei’s accession to the global scene has been awkward. Its corporate culture tends to come off somewhere between xenophobic and absurd to local critics. Sample headline published last year in the Times of India: “Huawei Technologies Bans Indians in India.” (Huawei says there’s no discrimination at its Indian facilities.) More […]

How can this work? Can someone simply shed his religious and political power like an old coat he no longer needs? Doesn’t this make Tibet like a Vatican without a pope, a place robbed of its unique identity? These are not only religious questions. The struggle over the legacy of the Dalai Lama has to […]

“I’d been expecting something like this for years, but they finally found a way to make it happen,” he said. The flash drive is a red herring, he believes—another in a series of reprisals against him by the Marines for revealing what he calls unconscionable mismanagement in the high command. After returning from a tour […]

For Army Spc. Brushaun Anderson, there was no escaping his torment. The senior noncommissioned officers who ruled his life at a remote patrol base in Iraq ordered him to wear a plastic trash bag because they said he was “dirty.” They forced him to perform excessive physical exercises in his body armor over and over […]

Once in Venezuela, other teams were put up in nice hotels, but the Iranian team, at the insistence of its country’s officials, was forced to stay in military barracks. Abedi was in a room with his brother’s best friend, Asgari. Quietly in the showers or in private moments between matches, Abedi began sharing his intentions […]

What happened to Jeloudov is a part of life in the armed forces that hardly anyone talks about: male-on-male sexual assault. In the staunchly traditional military culture, it’s an ugly secret, kept hidden by layers of personal shame and official denial. Last year nearly 50,000 male veterans screened positive for “military sexual trauma” at the […]

David Packouz and Efraim Diveroli had picked the perfect moment to get into the arms business. To fight simultaneous wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq, the Bush administration had decided to outsource virtually every facet of America’s military operations, from building and staffing Army bases to hiring mercenaries to provide security for diplomats abroad. After […]