By Elaine Donnelly
Extending sexual misconduct to combat units
Independent voices from the TWT Communities

Russian nuclear forces conducted a major exercise last month that tested the transport of both strategic and tactical nuclear weapons near Europe, according to United States officials.

Four years after its startup, U.S. Africa Command has it own fast-reaction commando force — based at Fort Carson, Colo., thousands of miles from the troubled continent.

The State Department should have closed the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, long before the Sept. 11 terrorist attack because it knew that local authorities could not protect the facility and that the city was a hotbed of extremism, according to a Senate report released Monday.

Jill Kelley's climb to the top of Tampa's social ladder may be as spectacular as her fall from it.

Lawmakers are digging into the tangled tale of emails that exposed an extramarital affair ending David Petraeus' CIA career and led investigators to a questionable relationship between a Florida socialite and the general commanding the war in Afghanistan.

The sex scandal that led to CIA Director David Petraeus' downfall widened Tuesday with word the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan is under investigation for thousands of alleged "inappropriate communications" with another woman involved in the case. Some of the material was "flirtatious," an official said.
The Obama administration's decision to grant retirement to the top general of U.S. Africa Command is part of the internal jockeying that goes on among the military branches to win top war-fighting assignments and was not related to the terrorist attack on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, a well-placed military source told The Washington Times.

As Americans fought for their lives in Benghazi, Libya, the Pentagon's options for direct intervention were narrowed to one: a fleet of F-16 fighters parked across the Mediterranean at NATO's air base in Aviano, Italy.

As U.S. Africa Command waited for any order to rescue Americans on Sept. 11 at the besieged consulate and CIA annex in Benghazi, Libya, it was missing a key unit that the Pentagon gives every regional four-star commander — an emergency strike force.

ARussian Akula-class cruise-missile attack submarine recently transited the North Atlantic and operated undetected in the Gulf of Mexico for an undeclared period of time. The United States did not find out until after it left. This should not have come as a surprise.

Is the world's balance of power shifting away from the West and moving over to India and China? That's what a number of geopolitical sages are discussing in think tanks from Moscow to Beijing to London to Washington. In a joint SOS piece in the November-December issue of Foreign Affairs, former Deputy Treasury Secretary Roger Altman and the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, Richard N. Haass, warn U.S. leaders to curb "the current debt addiction - or global capital markets will do it for them."

An Army general playing a prominent role in readying the military for open gays in the ranks has equated those who resist the plan to racists who opposed racial integration after World War II, according to two service members and a civilian who heard his remarks.