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So here I'm going to have a few links. I'll keep the number small, so eventually I may replace these, but not for the forseeable future.

 

A comic about two soldiers in Iraq.

 

Another Army comic, focusing on the horror that is "cadet land."

 

Now this one I actually need to really talk about for a while, so get ready for a brief history lesson and analysis. Before WWII the U.S. didn't have a peacetime intelligence service, so when the war started it created the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). The OSS was modeled on British intelligence agencies and became involved in covert actions during the war. It was made up of ivy league people with strong academic backgrounds - basically nerds. Eventually the OSS became a bunch of different things (like the CIA, Green Berets, etc), and the CIA really retained the nerd background/culture.

Now, in government/political science/international relations there's a point where people who are experts in the field start wanting to publish their ideas. The CIA especially had this problem because there were so many academics within its ranks. So, in order to keep its employees happy, and prevent them from running off and publishing potentially damaging or vital information elsewhere, they created a journal called Studies in Intelligence, which has both a classified version and an unclassified version. This also gives the CIA a measure of control over what does indeed get published.

As for the U.S. Army, they start to have a similar problem at the more senior ranks, especially because of how the Army's professional development system works (with things like the Command and General Staff College and the Army War College). Thus, much like the CIA, the Army has a bunch of publications it produces in order to solve that problem, among them Parameters, the quarterly journal put out by the Army War College.

 

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