The Political Conundrum!

War is hell. Freedom isn't free. Those two statements are echoed in Larry Cappetto's more than 600 interviews with U.S. military war veterans. He has traveled the country recording the experiences of World War II, Korea, Vietnam and Iraq veterans.

Missiles fired from U.S. drone aircraft hit a seminary and houses associated with a top Taliban commander, killing at least nine people officials and witnesses said. The explosions occurred in a village in North Waziristan, a militant stronghold in Pakistan's northwestern wild tribal belt.

Russia's president says troops will pull out of Georgian territory outside of South Ossetia and Abkhazia after European monitors deploy next month.

On Wednesday, 40 of the 69 surviving crew members of the USS Pueblo will gather in neighboring Essex for a four-day reunion featuring exhibits and speeches by experts on U.S.-Korean relations.

A 52-year-old former marketing executive founded the nonprofit Project Homecoming to help locate the more than 80,000 American troops missing from World War II and the Korean and Vietnam wars

In the coming days, Raymond Odierno, now bearing four stars on his uniform, takes over from Petraeus as the senior commander in Iraq at a time of momentous change.

After a few years in the wilderness, the U.S. military and its allies in other parts of the world have honed the cutting edge of a significant series of steps that are yielding highly successful results in combatting non-state armed groups-including terrorists, not just in Iraq but in Colombia and elsewhere.

The Washington Post's recent story on the "fusion cells" gets at the core of the program: The integration and blending of field intelligence (human and signal) with the ability to act rapidly on that information.

The NSA targeted its listening operations, the Treasury Department began tracing anything to do with money and Special Operations Forces, with the help of the latest technology and imaging capabilities, carry out the operations. This website was the first media outlet to discuss the operations of the joint DoD-Treasury "threat finance" cell unit in Baghdad in posts last November 2 and again on November 20, and the first publicly available monograph or study of terrorist financing by the Defense Department was released on October 12 of last year. "Threat finance" units are now operational in each of the military commands.

"To me, it's not just war-fighting now but in the future," Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the newspaper. "It's been the synergy, it's been the integration that has had such an impact."

One of the keys has been the ability, over time, to force the sharing of a range of skills in a single unit, so that the traditional segregation and stove pipes have ended. The value of tracing even useless-looking information, particularly from the "pocket litter" of those captured or killed, has proved itself on many occasions.

While this is integration is a fact at the level of these small task forces, it remains far from accomplished on broad level. In fact, much of the upper tiers of the intelligence community are just as resistant to change and perhaps less inclined to share intelligence than 9-11.

But the success of fusing all elements of intelligence and force to capture often elusive enemies is not just evident in Iraq. In its own way, the Colombian military and policy have been on the cutting edge of the program in combatting the FARC. My full blog is here.

U.S. and Vietnamese experts and officials opened a weeklong meeting Monday in Hanoi on US aid to remediate the effects of Agent Orange, the chemical defoliant the United States sprayed during the Vietnam War.

Georgia accused Russia on Monday of a "campaign of harassment and persecution" in its two separatist regions and called on the International Court of Justice to impose emergency measures to halt killings and forced expulsions.

The U.S. military says it has "new information" about an American attack that Afghanistan says killed 90 civilians and it is sending a senior military officer to the country to review its initial investigation that concluded no more than seven civilians died.