It’s about time. The reality, of course, is that women have been in combat for a long time, and nowhere more than in the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, where the front lines rarely exist except in the most fluid way. This is exemplified by the awarding of Silver Stars–the nation’s third highest medal for valor–to two women, one in Iraq and one in Afghanistan.

I covered a fair bit of this in 2009:

The integration of woman into the armed forces over the last several decades has been a contentious and slow process, with an enormous amount of resistance to the idea of women serving both from within and without the military. The debate over women in the military presaged and in some ways predicted the debate of gays in the military. Women would destroy combat cohesion; they were physically weaker than men and would be unable to handle the physical requirements of military life; the…

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Senator Rand Paul, to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton today:

Mr. Paul told Secretary Clinton if he had been president at the time of the Benghazi attack that he would have relieved her from her job, for not knowing about appeals for more security.

“I would have relieved you of your post,” he said “I think it’s inexcusable that you did not know about this.”

That is military terminology. Secretary Clinton is not in the military, in the military chain of command, or have any official military connection. She is a civilian official. I wig out about this because it plugs into another bit of annoying militaristic verbal imprecision, the use of “commander in chief.” I would note that these four men–George H.W. Bush, William Jefferson Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama–have something in common. They are not, nor have they ever been, anyone’s commander in chief,…

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I’m going to pick on Jill Lepore a bit, not because I necessarily disagree with her larger point, but because she elides a few things in a way I think awkward. Lepore argues that the US military, is and has been for a long time, too large. She is making Eisenhower’s “military-industrial” complex case, updated for the global war on terror. But she makes some interesting claims:

Between 1998 and 2011, military spending doubled, reaching more than seven hundred billion dollars a year—more, in adjusted dollars, than at any time since the Allies were fighting the Axis.

This is true, but misleading. The budget has grown, but so has the GDP, meaning that the defense budget, as a share of the American economy, is lower than at any time since before World War II with the exception of the 1990s. But, fair enough, Lepore’s making the point that the defense budget is quite large, and that’s …

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World War I is the war of poetry and literature. Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, Siegfried Sassoon, and Robert Graves are all laureates of that war, official or not. But other wars bring their own visions, as Roy Fisher demonstrates for World War II in his “The Entertainment of War:”

A mile away in the night I had heard the bombs
Sing and then burst themselves between cramped houses
With bright soft flashes and sounds like banging doors;

The last of them crushed the four bodies into the ground,
Scattered the shelter, and blasted my uncle’s corpse
Over the housetop and into the street beyond.

Death is always meaningful to those dying, Fisher thinks, but sometimes not to anyone else:

These were marginal people I had met only rarely
And the end of the whole household meant that no grief was seen;
Never have people seemed so absent from their own deaths.

Fisher “realized a little…

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