Robert Farley

Some good signs, including a substantial drop in attacks off Somalia. Elizabeth Dickinson: After a slew of hijackings last fall, the world’s navies finally seemed to get serious about fighting the pirates. Previously, many countries feared that arresting pirates could lead to awkward legal proceedings and even amnesty suits by suspects claiming they could be […]

Eve Fairbanks of The New Republic and I appeared on bloggingheads yesterday on, among other things, the critical issue of whether Barack Obama or George W. Bush more resembles Prince Hal of Henry IV parts 1 and 2: We also discuss the continued fallout from the South Ossetia War, and the likely tone of President […]

Matt and Spencer greet the news that China will contribute to anti-piracy efforts with a bit of faux surprise; the motivating concept behind the most recent Maritime Strategy and its predecessor, the 1000 Ship Navy, holds that naval power isn’t zero-sum. Galrahn has a good discussion here considering piracy as the quintessential test of the […]

According to a classified Pentagon report obtained by The New York Times, reconstruction of the Georgian Army in the wake of the South Ossetia War has not gone well: The Georgian military, which was routed in August during a brief war with Russia, suffers from widespread mismanagement and unqualified leadership, and is in need of […]

Folks are talking about this outstanding Vanity Fair article on torture by David Rose. Spencer highlights this quote: “We were done a tremendous disservice by the administration,” one official says. “We had no background in this; it’s not something we do. They stuck us with a totally unwelcome job and left us hanging out to […]

One of the reasons that people worry so much about connections between pirates and terrorists is that the two groups exist in the same legal netherworld. Drug traffickers also inhabit this world, which is why we get absurd arguments about how the terrorists will win if people smoke marijuana. Moises Naim, editor of Foreign Policy, […]

The Indian Navy, fresh from accidentally sinking a Thai fishing trawler that it thought was a pirate mothership, captured 23 pirates on Saturday. In what may be a troubling sign, eleven of the pirates were from Yemen, rather than from Somalia. No word yet on how the Indian Navy will dispose of the pirates, although […]

Way back when, Way back when, The American Prospect began to amass a team of remarkably smart and talented young writers. TAPPED, the community blog of the Prospect, gave folks like Ezra Klein and Dana Goldstein and Matt Yglesias a platform to show how smart they were, but it also gave them an opportunity to […]

Is the F-22 Raptor too big to fail in these tough economic times? Without further spending for the F-22, companies that supply critical components for it would begin shutting down soon. The chairmen and ranking Republicans on both the House and Senate defense appropriations subcommittees recently wrote to Mr. Gates to voice their support for […]

I can’t recommend highly enough the BBC Radio program “The Human Button,” which explores the human element of the British nuclear deterrent. The program interviews a number of former government officials and military officers, from Secretary of State for Defence Denis Healey to bomber pilots and submarine commanders. The most interesting parts involve the “inherently […]