WASHINGTON -- After a CIA Predator drone released its guided bomb high over Yemen on Nov. 3, 2002, the resulting explosion did more than kill six suspected al Qaeda terrorists riding in the targeted car.

This strike, the first by an armed drone outside a traditional, recognized war zone, also...

WASHINGTON -- With an arsenal that could rain down hundreds of devastating nuclear warheads on North Korea, the United States can afford to react calmly to North Korea's testing of a nuclear device on Tuesday -- and perhaps even proceed with nuclear reductions talks, a top arms expert said.

President...

President Obama insists that the big U.S. role in Afghanistan is coming to an end -- he may use his State of the Union speech Tuesday to announce more cuts from the 66,000 American troops currently deployed there.

What's not coming to an end is the gusher of billions of...

WASHINGTON -- The debate over armed drones and whether the United States should use missile-firing robots to kill people identified as terrorists is an interesting one but it misses the point, many hardened warfighters say.

The real issue is about killing.

The debate, many say, should focus not on the...

WASHINGTON -- Smarting under the U.S. drone attacks it calls a violation of its sovereignty and international law, Pakistan has threatened to withhold cooperation with the United States on counter-terrorism operations until the drone strikes stop.

Sherry Rehman, Pakistan's ambassador to Washington, said Tuesday that the continuing drone...

Until the white-bearded Afghan man on a bike showed up, the joint patrol with Afghan national police and paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne had gone without incident. It was hot and tense, boots kicking up dust, men and boys squatting in shopfronts watching with indifference or hostility. One of the...

WASHINGTON -- In roughly eight hours of often heated discussions with the Senate Armed Services Committee Thursday, defense secretary-nominee Chuck Hagel raised and then left unanswered the critical question looming over the Pentagon: with defense budgets sinking, should U.S. defense strategy shrink as well?

And no one on the committee...

WASHINGTON -- For more than a decade, Congress and the Pentagon have lavished money on the nation's 1.3 million active-duty troops and their families. Salaries and benefits soared far above civilian compensation, military bases and housing were refurbished, support services like day care, family counseling and on-base college courses were...

The U.S. exit strategy for Afghanistan is taking a beating in the northern city of Kunduz, a bustling, cosmopolitan, university town where women often shun the burqa in favor of bright turquoise gowns and scarves.

A peaceful place last time I was there, with Afghan police and army units...

The Obama administration and the Department of Veterans Affairs are unsurpassed when it comes to voicing support for veterans. And the VA, under Eric Shinseki, has made significant progress toward its announced goals of ending veterans homelessness and erasing that huge backlog of claims that's been stacking up...

As a journalist covering Marines in desert combat training some time ago, I was tapped by the company commander to substitute as the main gun loader on an M1A2 Abrams tank. His loader had come down sick. I protested; he insisted, and he won. I reluctantly climbed into the tank,...

WASHINGTON -- The military services began racing Thursday to open jobs across the armed forces to women, a historic change that likely will put more women into direct combat in Afghanistan and in any future conflicts.

The sweeping new rules at the Pentagon, ordered by outgoing Defense Secretary Leon Panetta...

Just to be clear, it's been a decade or more since I've gotten angry emails from civilian macho-men incensed at the idea that women could and should be allowed to take on combat roles in the armed forces. Many of the military women I know have been agitating for decades...

WASHINGTON -- As the technology for arming drones spreads around the world, terrorists could use the unmanned, missile-firing aircraft to attack and kill the president and other U.S. leaders, the former chief of U.S. intelligence said Tuesday.

Retired Adm. Dennis Blair, who served as President Obama's first director of national...

Sin aviso, en mitad de la noche del 3 de enero, en una carretera de tierra situada en una remota región de Pakistán, cayeron dos misiles sobre una camioneta descubierta de doble cabina y la hicieron estallar en pedazos, junto con los seis hombres que iban dentro. Podemos estar seguros...

Winter has hit hard across Afghanistan, and nowhere more so than in camps for internally displaced Afghans, where some 450,000 desperate families have ended up after fleeing the war and its ravages. Among them are many children and elderly, and according to new report by Amnesty International, they...

I wrote yesterday about the developing opportunity for new SOF missions in Mali and perhaps Algeria, if the Algerians and French would stand aside.
Today in London, SecDef issued what sounded to me like a warning order:

Terrorists should be on notice that they...

WASHINGTON -- Sharpened by combat over more than a decade of intense counter-terrorist operations across Afghanistan and Iraq, U.S. special operations forces are well-poised to mount a rescue mission if ordered against Islamist terrorists holding Western hostages deep in Algeria's Eastern desert.

But the extensive U.S. experience in operating against...

WASHINGTON -- Without warning in the dead of night of Jan. 3, on a dirt road in a remote region of Pakistan, two missiles slammed into a double-cab pickup truck and blew it to smithereens along with the six men inside. It's safe to say the victims never heard the...

In Mali about three months ago, a dusty Toyota pick-up truck carrying 17 Islamic preachers lurched to a stop at an army roadblock outside the town of Diabaly, just across the border from Mauritania. In the dusk, soldiers swarmed around the truck, then opened fire with automatic weapons. Sixteen of...