By Matt Wilson Best Defense future of war entry

It's been almost 70 years since a great-power war, and war in general is declining. What does this mean concerning the future of war?

I liked this comment yesterday from the over-educated, eloquent "Kieselguhr Kid" in response to the article about Navy officers leaving:

OK, so as a junior-to-midgrade officer in the process of dropping out, I'm hating this article. It contains all the wrong ideas and I hear them all the time anyway -- it reflects the institutional mindset of the brass.

Someone is killing Iraqi professors working in Libya. Then there are the Finnish jihadists in Syria.

Can't we all just get along?

In other weird news, the job of overseeing Eurasia military intelligence (that is, former Soviet states) is open at DIA. Interesting time to have that job vacant. A friend asks, "I wonder if the guy was planning on leaving, or if he made the wrong call on Ukraine and was held to account."

You can work alongside someone for years and not really know them, what they think, what is going on inside their lives.

That thought hit me repeatedly as I read the first 30 pages of Ann Scott Tyson's American Spartan: The Promise, the Mission and the Betrayal of Special Forces Major Jim Gant. I didn't know about her deep depression, her marriage breaking up, or her romance with and marriage to a Special Forces officer. (BTW, she is the third journalist who is a female graduate of Harvard I know who wed an SF officer. They should form a special society.) Nor did I know that she took solace in the works of Homer, as I did a few years earlier when trying to figure out war and coming home from it. For a year, I drove to and from work every day listening and re-listening to The Odyssey, read by Ian McKellen.

By Capt. Herb Carmen, U.S. Navy Best Defense guest columnist

Earlier this month, Cmdr. Guy "Bus" Snodgrass wrote a 24-page white paper titled "Keep a Weather Eye on the Horizon: A Navy Officer Retention Study." He describes current trends in naval officer retention with historical context of earlier cycles of retention challenges. He also provides recommendations to address what he observed as a "tipping point" in officer retention. He explains that high operational tempo, plummeting morale, and an improving economy outside defense are factors leading to historically low retention numbers in the junior officer ranks and a dramatic increase of squadron commanders who retire after their command tours rather than continue to serve as captains.