Staff Bios
Thomas Donnelly
Thomas Donnelly, a defense and security policy analyst at the American Enterprise Institute. From 1995 to 1999, he was policy group director and a professional staff member for the House Committee on Armed Services. Mr. Donnelly also served as a member of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission. He is a former editor of Armed Forces Journal, Army Times, and Defense News.
Follow The Examiner
U.S. must back Karzai — flaws and all
Published: Nov 03, 2009
The weekend withdrawal by President Hamid Karzai's opponent from the planned re-run of the Afghanistan elections doesn't just clarify politics in Kabul. It ought to have a similar effect in Washington.
Barack Obama's agony in deciding whether to provide Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal with the troops he thinks he needs to conduct a comprehensive counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan has indeed begun to look like dithering. Not just to former Vice President Cheney but to leaders of NATO -- yes, while the war is being "Americanized" we still have allies who are fighting just as hard and paying a proportionately painful price in blood. Of all the objections raised by...
Continued...
Thomas Donnelly: Taliban siege on outpost echoes one of year ago
Published: Oct 06, 2009
The village of Kamdesh in Nuristan province is almost as deep as one can go into the Hindu Kush yet still be in Afghanistan. The Taliban siege of a joint outpost this past weekend left eight American soldiers and two Afghan police dead, with20 policemen taken hostage and likely to be executed. The Kamdesh attacks echo a similar siege with similar results about a year ago in the village of Wanat, which provoked multiple U.S. military investigations and has been the subject of several extended media reports -- the day of the Kamdesh attacks, The Washington Post splashed its version of the Wanat story across the front page.
The emerging narrative of Wanat and, if initial...
Continued...
America's air supremacy allowed to evaporate
Published: Sep 08, 2009
Since World War II, air power has been the distinctively American way of war. Conversely, the maturation of air power has been coincidental with the rise of the United States has history's "sole superpower." Yet now the future supremacy of American air power is an open question. Not so long ago this seemed inconceivable. In the wake of Operation Desert Storm, the Air Force commissioned Eliot Cohen, head of the strategy department at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, to lead the "Gulf War Air Power Survey," in conscious imitation of the bombing surveys of World War II. Cohen disappointed the service's most zealous enthusiasts, but nevertheless...
Continued...
Will Obama preserve America's global power?
Published: Aug 11, 2009
Since the end of the Cold War, many conservatives have consoled themselves with the thought that, in the end, there was a bipartisan consensus on America's role in the world, that the commitment to preserving U.S. power was deeply ingrained.
This seemed to be borne out in the behavior of the last two administrations. Bill Clinton and his lieutenants, after much bloviation about "assertive multilateralism" and an initial deference to Europe in the Balkans, in the end assumed a very traditional posture -- indeed, Madeleine Albright claimed the United States was the "indispensable nation."
George W. Bush promised "humility" in the 2000 campaign, and his...
Continued...
Defense ‘transformation’ back from the grave
Published: Jul 14, 2009
The technology-first approach to war — the philosophy that animated former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s attitudes toward Afghanistan and Iraq with such tragic consequences — is returning from the grave....
Continued...
Coalition still critical as America escalates Afghan war
Published: Jun 16, 2009
Last week Defense Secretary Robert Gates met with his fellow NATO defense ministers to confirm what had been made obvious by the dismissal of Gen. David McKiernan as the top commander in Afghanistan: The war is once again mostly an American show.
There are three immediate implications of this Americanization of the Afghan war. The first is that it carries the fight into the heart of enemy resistance in the southern provinces of Helmand and Kandahar. The city of Kandahar is commonly called the “capital of Pashtunistan,” referring to the Pashtuns who live astride the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Kandahar also was the de facto capital of the Taliban government and...
Continued...
Amid the cheers, Gates puts U.S. on risky path
Published: May 19, 2009
Defense Secretary Robert Gates is very much the man of the moment. Hearts are aflutter in the Washington Establishment. Katie Couric’s teenage-crush interview on last Sunday’s “60 Minutes” may have been the most egregious example, but it has become conventional wisdom that Gates is both a visionary and decisive leader, a Churchillian figure bent on “changing the culture” at the Pentagon.
There is no question that Gates bestrides American military affairs, but the wisdom of his recent decisions deserves greater scrutiny and less celebration. The dismissal of Gen. David McKiernan as the senior commander in Afghanistan raises as many questions as it...
Continued...
