Maj. Sjursen

Latest by Maj. Sjursen in Chronicles

• Blog

  October 3, 2018

  Insider Attacks

  He was shot in the back, the ultimate act of treachery. On September 3rd, a U.S Army sergeant major was killed by two Afghan police officers—the very people his unit, the new Security Force Assistance Brigade, was there to train.

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• Blog

  February 23, 2018

  Trump’s National Defense Strategy

  Think of it as the chicken-or-the-egg question for the ages: Do very real threats to the United States inadvertently benefit the military-industrial complex or does the national security state, by its very nature, conjure up inflated threats to feed that defense machine?

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• Blog

  November 6, 2017

  Congress’s Romance with Cowardice

  In retrospect, Vietnam emerges as just one more chapter in 70 years of ineptitude and apathy on the part of the Senate and House of Representatives when it comes to their constitutionally granted war powers.

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• Blog

  October 18, 2017

  The Empire Comes Home

  I can remember both so well. 2006: my first raid in South Baghdad. 2014: watching on YouTube as a New York police officer asphyxiated—murdered—Eric Garner for allegedly selling loose cigarettes on a Staten Island street corner not five miles from my old apartment. Both events shocked the conscience.

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• Blog

  June 29, 2017

  Tread Carefully: The Folly of the Next Afghan “Surge”

  We walked in a single file. Not because it was tactically sound. It wasn’t—at least according to standard infantry doctrine. Patrolling southern Afghanistan in column formation limited maneuverability, made it difficult to mass fire, and exposed us to enfilading machine-gun bursts.

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