Dexter Filkins on why the “non-combat” distinction is meaningless given the nature of our recent wars: “In the twelve years since the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan began, the military has been steadily pushing women into jobs that no one could call ‘non-combat’ without stripping the phrase of its meaning…” Continue reading: http://nyr.kr/10SsrlV

(Source: newyorker.com)

An Army of Women: Read Amy Davidson on the end of the ban on women in combat, plus a slideshow of servicewomen through history: http://nyr.kr/UoffRs

(Source: newyorker.com)

The Pentagon has yet to meet a military in a desperately poor or hopelessly corrupt country that it does not believe it can train and equip to a professional standard. Pentagon training has in fact strengthened and stabilized professional militaries in many developing countries. Yet some of the militaries that the United States has mentored in North and West Africa are best understood as criminal organizations that happen to wear pressed uniforms and epaulets. The better that some of these students learn to shoot while at Fort Benning, and the better the equipment they receive as favored clients, the more effective they become at their enduring vocations—drug smuggling, coup-making, and profitable collusion with pirates and terrorists.

Captain Amadou Sanogo, of Mali, was a longtime mentee of American trainers. He led a coup d’état against Mali’s weak democratic government early last year; after he seized power, reporters who interviewed him noticed that he proudly sported a United States Marine Corps pin on his uniform. As it turned out, Sanogo had been dispatched to the U.S. for training several times. Unfortunately, his skill as a mutineer ran “contrary to everything that is taught in U.S. military schools,” as a Pentagon spokeswoman later put it to the Agence France Presse.

…In the age of Barbary, as today, the most predictable aspect of war—and, for that matter, of American capacity-building—is that it will have unintended, unpredicted consequences.

Continue reading Steve Coll on on kidnapping in Algeria and terrorism in North Africa: http://nyr.kr/VuFaWu 

Photograph by Anis Belghoul/AP.

The U.S. once regarded a standing army as a form of tyranny. Now it spends more on defense than all other nations combined. In this week’s issue, Jill Lepore asks, how much military is enough? Read more: http://nyr.kr/Visi5Y

Colonel James S. Ketchum dreamed of a war without killing…

In this week’s issue, Raffi Khatchadourian illuminates the history and the contested legacy of a secret Cold War experiment that tested chemical weapons on thousands of American soldiers. “The drugs under review ranged from tear gas and LSD to highly lethal nerve agents, like VX, a substance developed at Edgewood and, later, sought by Saddam Hussein,” Khatchadourian writes. Some veterans of the tests believe that they sustained permanent damage. Next year, a San Francisco law firm will bring to trial a class-action lawsuit against the federal government, on behalf of former test subjects. 

After the Second World War, the American government acquired the formulas for Nazi chemical weapons and brought scientists and doctors to the Edgewood Arsenal, a secret Army research facility near the Chesapeake Bay, to study them. In the mid-nineteen-fifties, the research gained a new component, as the Army began searching for “compounds that would create the same debilitating mental side effects as nerve gas, but without the lethality.”  

Khatchadourian speaks with Colonel James S. Ketchum, now eighty-one and the most prominent defender of Edgewood, who will presumably be the star witness in the class-action suit. Ketchum, who was involved in human experiments at the arsenal for nearly a decade, eventually becoming the head of the Clinical Research Department, “went about his work in the belief that chemicals are more humane instruments of warfare than bullets and shrapnel,” Khatchadourian writes.  Ketchum “insists that there was never any ambiguity about the drug experiments during the recruitment process,” Khatchadourian writes. Even though soldiers were told that they could excuse themselves from an experiment, many felt that they could not back down on a commitment to a superior officer. And the volunteers, after their stay at the arsenal, “were blindly pushed back into the Army at large, with no follow-up care.” 

The Army has determined the “fundamental impracticality” of psychochemical warfare, and has not employed the drugs that were tested at Edgewood in combat. Within the Army, and in the world of medical research, “the secret clinical trials are a faint memory,” Khatchadourian writes. “But for some of the surviving test subjects, and the doctors who tested them, what happened at Edgewood remains deeply unresolved. Were the human experiments there a Dachau-like horror, or were they sound and necessary science?” For his part, Ketchum tells Khatchadourian, “I struggle with these things. But I have always had the feeling that I am doing more the right thing than the wrong thing, here.” 

Follow this link to read “Operation Delirium”: http://nyr.kr/UjBXFJ

Amy Davidson asks, “The Obama Administration worried about how Romney might use its targeted-assassination program: but was the problem Mitt or the “kill list” itself?” Continue reading.

(Source: newyorker.com)

(Source: newyorker.com)

In the July 9th and 16th issue of the magazine, Dexter Filkins reports from Afghanistan as the U.S. prepares to withdraw. He joins Steve Coll and Nicholas Thompson to talk about what went wrong and why the future looks so grim for Afghans. Also, Deborah Treisman and Peter Canby explain why the magazine fact-checks its fiction.

Listen to the mp3 on the player here, or right-click here to download: http://nyr.kr/LSM4Ea

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How does one photograph a story that has not yet occurred? How does one evoke a sense of what might happen, or of what could?

This was the challenge for the Afghan-Swiss photographer Zalmaï: to capture the sense of foreboding that, as Dexter Filkins writes in this week’s issue, permeates Afghanistan as American troops prepare to withdraw. “People forget that almost thirty million people live in Afghanistan,” Zalmaï told me from Kabul. “Yet twenty thousand Taliban can completely destroy these thirty million lives. How Afghanistan will avoid falling into civil war again, I just don’t know.”

Zalmaï’s work is currently on display in Kabul as part of Documenta, an internationally renowned exhibition series that occurs every five years. Click-through for a slideshow of his images: http://nyr.kr/KOkx0j