Word: pentagonal
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...arrived, Petraeus staged elections for a city council and began to disburse funds to clean schools, reopen factories, fix potholes and establish recreation programs. He was, in effect, the mayor of Mosul. The tactics Petraeus used were well known to a tiny cadre of military intellectuals in the Pentagon: they were classic counterinsurgency methods, and they were scorned by most of the brass (and by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld), who thought that nation building was a job for social workers, not soldiers. Even though counterinsurgency seemed to be working in Mosul, the Pentagon wasn't impressed...
...carrying out the 1998 bombing of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, have been hiding. On Wednesday, a Somali official said Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, a top al-Qaeda official, had been killed. "Somalia is one of those troublesome ungoverned areas--perhaps the worst in the world," a senior Pentagon official told TIME. "The U.S. has the authority to strike where it needs to there...
...came from Somalia's Transitional Federal Government, which had held power for all of 11 days at the time of the Jan. 8 strike. "It's one of those places where even the State Department, which is usually very cautious about us acting, said, Hey, go ahead," said the Pentagon official...
...Corps grow to 202,000, an increase of 27,000. Both services have been calling for bump-ups for years, and some observers believe the the service chiefs' official support of the new strategy is the trade-off for getting their overall increases approved. Gates will also abandon the Pentagon policy of restricting National Guard and reserve troops to two years of combat duty for every five served, in order to be able to call up more for service in Iraq...
...This is probably the biggest piece of kabuki in the President's speech. Just a few months ago, in November, Abizaid told the Senate Armed Services committee that there were no - as in zero - Iraqi army units currently operating independent of U.S. forces. The Pentagon's inspector general has reported they lack the men, the weapons, the trucks - pretty much everything - to be ready to fight. Meanwhile, the Iraq Study Group said the police units were almost completely corrupt or infiltrated by sectarian militias. It is a little hard to square those reports with the way the President talked about...