ASSOCIATION OF THE UNITED STATES ARMY

Gen. Gordon R. Sullivan, USA, Ret., president and CEO of the Association of the United States Army (AUSA), has announced that Lt. Gen. Patricia McQuistion, USA, Ret., has been appointed the AUSA senior director for membership effective Nov. 2 – a new position focusing on recruiting and retaining Association individual, corporate and life members.

In this position, McQuistion will also oversee AUSA’s Regional Activities and Marketing directorates. She will report to the Association’s vice president for membership and meetings.

Sullivan, in announcing the appointment, said, "General McQuistion...

Defense-related legislation moves through Congress. Four pieces of vital legislation are shaping the Army’s future. Here is a rundown:

Congress recently passed the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2015, a measure that provides budget stability for two years at funding levels above the 2011 Budget Control Act and sequestration. It also suspends the debt limit until March 2017, thus avoiding a default on America’s debts.

The agreement raises defense and non-defense discretionary budget caps by $25 billion each in fiscal 2016 and $15 billion each in fiscal 2017, with a total price tag of $80 billion.

It...

AUSA awards to Army units and Association chapters were presented at the Annual Meeting’s opening ceremony by Gen. Gordon R. Sullivan, USA, Ret., AUSA
president, left, and Lt. Gen. Roger Thompson, USA, Ret., vice president for membership and meetings, right.

Largest Chapter: Central Texas – Fort Hood Chapter
Maj. Gen. John Uberti, deputy commander, III Corps and Fort Hood; John Crutchfield,
president, Central Texas – Fort Hood Chapter; and Command Sgt. Maj. Patrick Akuna,
command sergeant major, III Corps and Fort Hood.

Reserve Command with Strongest Support to AUSA:
99th Regional Support Command...

There’s No Easy Way to Explain Warfighting  Reconsidering the American Way of War: U.S. Military Practice from the Revolution to Afghanistan. Antulio J. Echevarria II. Georgetown University Press. 207 pages. $29.95. By Lt. Col. James Jay Carafano, U.S. Army retiredDefeat creates innumerable explanations as to what went wrong. While American troops streamed out of Vietnam after years of seemingly fruitless struggle, there were answers aplenty to explain how the U.S. got off course. Historian Russell F. Weigley penned one of the most widely read and influential treatises, The American Way of War...

There’s No Easy Way to Explain Warfighting  Reconsidering the American Way of War: U.S. Military Practice from the Revolution to Afghanistan. Antulio J. Echevarria II. Georgetown University Press. 207 pages. $29.95. By Lt. Col. James Jay Carafano, U.S. Army retiredDefeat creates innumerable explanations as to what went wrong. While American troops streamed out of Vietnam after years of seemingly fruitless struggle, there were answers aplenty to explain how the U.S. got off course. Historian Russell F. Weigley penned one of the most widely read and influential treatises, The American Way of War...

There’s No Easy Way to Explain Warfighting  Reconsidering the American Way of War: U.S. Military Practice from the Revolution to Afghanistan. Antulio J. Echevarria II. Georgetown University Press. 207 pages. $29.95. By Lt. Col. James Jay Carafano, U.S. Army retiredDefeat creates innumerable explanations as to what went wrong. While American troops streamed out of Vietnam after years of seemingly fruitless struggle, there were answers aplenty to explain how the U.S. got off course. Historian Russell F. Weigley penned one of the most widely read and influential treatises, The American Way of War...

There’s No Easy Way to Explain Warfighting  Reconsidering the American Way of War: U.S. Military Practice from the Revolution to Afghanistan. Antulio J. Echevarria II. Georgetown University Press. 207 pages. $29.95. By Lt. Col. James Jay Carafano, U.S. Army retiredDefeat creates innumerable explanations as to what went wrong. While American troops streamed out of Vietnam after years of seemingly fruitless struggle, there were answers aplenty to explain how the U.S. got off course. Historian Russell F. Weigley penned one of the most widely read and influential treatises, The American Way of War...

A military spouse can expect to move eight to 12 times in 20 years, according to the Pentagon’s Military Community and Family Policy office. For some, the transitions come even more frequently. Starting over can be difficult, even under the best of circumstances.Do military families really have the time to connect to society outside the gates? Are they able to put down roots in a community? What helps or hinders families from connecting with their civilian counterparts?On or Off Post?With the privatization of most Army housing, families have more and more options regarding living situations...

First Prize Christina J. Graber, Joppa, Md. “Out of the Smoke"The 2015 ARMY Magazine SFC Dennis Steele Photo Contest had a strong turnout, with Army veteran Christina J. Graber placing first for the second consecutive year.Her photograph, titled “Out of the Smoke,” depicts Spc. (P) Michael Murphy, a competitor during an Expert Field Medical Badge competition in New Jersey in April. As a bystander at the event, Graber took the photo as the smoke surrounded Murphy. Her heart raced, she said.“It happened so fast,” Graber said, adding that as soon as she snapped the photo, Murphy “seemed, without...

Thirteen years after winning a 10-day war for independence, Slovenia in 2004 was admitted to NATO, thanks in part to the Army National Guard.Today, 2,200 U.S. personnel along with Patriot missiles; fighter aircraft; and command, control and communications systems are deployed to Jordan to block advances by the Islamic State group—again, thanks in part to the Guard.In 2013, senior officers from the communist Vietnam People’s Army clambered in and out of helicopters at an Army aviation support facility in Oregon and posed for pictures in the state Capitol. The National Guard made that happen...

A 775,000-acre, sparsely vegetated landscape of the Mojave Desert holds a key to the future of land warfare. The imposing physical locale of the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, Calif., is a modern-day Garden of Eden in terms of building and fine-tuning the Army and the joint force for future conflicts that are expected to require agile, adaptable and ready forces; and molding the creative and skilled leaders needed in what the Army sees as a future of complex threats and short-fuse missions.Daily news reports leave little doubt that the U.S. potentially faces an increasingly long...

  The query was presented to the brigade commander at the morning battlefield update, “How many patrols did you go on today?” Scratching his head in bewilderment as to why that information—or, more accurately, that data—was so important that a division commander was incessant on knowing it, the colonel struggled to answer. In an attempt to combine sarcasm, frustration, diligence and honesty into a formed response, the colonel responded, “All of them.”While this answer didn’t appease the senior commander’s appetite for collecting data on his own forces, it did make everyone else in the room...

In “The Surge Fallacy,” published in the September issue of The Atlantic, Peter Beinart writes yet one more essay that misses the point about the Surge and what American political leaders should learn about the use of military force. So far, the Iraq War represents two strategic blunders. The first, committed by the George W. Bush administration, was to believe that war could impose democracy quickly, easily and cheaply. (The two prime examples of war replacing authoritative governments with democracies, Germany and Japan, were anything but quick and far from a light footprint.) The second...

For all of us who are commissioned officers, every single one of us has a sergeant. That sergeant has created us, has set standards, trained us and made us who were are," Army Chief of Staff Gen. Mark A. Milley said.

"There’s none of us who’ve come in the Army as second lieutenants, and cannot remember our first sergeant," he said.

Milley spoke during an Oct. 15 dedication and ribbon-cutting ceremony during which a portion of the Pentagon’s more than 17 miles of hallway was dedicated to the Office of the Sergeant Major of the Army (SMA), a position that was first held by William O. Wooldridge in...

NCOs from across the Army gathered during AUSA’s Annual Meeting and Exposition to discuss "Not in my Squad," an initiative to rid the ranks of sexual assault and harassment.

The initiative "is ultimately about trust," said Sgt. Maj. of the Army Daniel A. Dailey at the Sergeant Major of the Army’s Professional Development Forum.

Announced by Dailey earlier this year, "Not in my Squad" is an Army-wide initiative that highlights the critical role the NCO corps plays in preventing sexual assault and sexual harassment.

Dailey said that the majority of Army leadership is "at the base of the pyramid"...