Slate

What is it with documentaries offering silver bullet solutions for the woes of the American public education system?

Much has changed since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, but few American institutions have changed as much as the military.

At the most basic level, it has shifted from a peacetime military to a continuously wartime military, and it has done so for the first time since the United States got rid of the draft.

A few years ago, I was riding shotgun with my cousin, traveling down a Greek highway lined by olive trees. The view was marred when I watched him casually finish a Coke, roll down the window, and throw the can out. While I've spit my gum out on the street plenty of times, such casual littering startled me. But my cousin saw no harm in tossing a little soda can into the vast world.

CNN National Security Analyst Peter Bergen and Homeland Security expert Juliette Kayyem will argue for the motion that "It is time to end the war on terror." Former Deputy Homeland Security Adviser Richard Falkenrath and former CIA and NSA Director ...

In 1439, Johannes Gutenberg sparked an information revolution. The invention of movable type lowered barriers for sharing ideas, creating spaces for reformation and revolution. Today's Internet fulfills the same role, a flexible medium for sharing information and democratic communications. It was with this idealized Web in mind that President Obama used his 2011 State of the Union address to call for an expansion of next-generation mobile broadband.

Gen. David Petraeus stepped down as commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan on Monday, just as the Taliban's strength seems to be on the rise. The militants' growing power comes not from conventional military victories—on that score, Petraeus has racked up considerable advances in the past year—but, rather, from what may be a shift in the real war that's going on: the war for the favor (or at least complicity) of the Afghan people.

Our critique of the National Broadband Map, "Map to Nowhere," has caused quite a stir over at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA). Yet the response from Steven Rosenberg, chief data officer with the FCC's Wireline Competition Bureau, offers PR spin and damage control rather than substantive ideas.

It's a fair bet that when Leon Panetta took the helm of the Pentagon last week, one of his marching orders was to find more ways to cut the defense budget, and not just around the edges.

One result of this is that the Army will very likely take a whacking.

President Barack Obama's decision to pull 33,000 troops out of Afghanistan by the end of next summer—10,000 of them by the end of this year—reflects a scaling back of U.S. goals and strategy in the war. Either that, or it doesn't make much sense.

The White House debate over how many troops to withdraw from Afghanistan next month is really a surrogate for a larger, more fractious debate over the wisdom and strategy of the war itself.