Quick Links, Admin Notes

Over the past week or so, I've been able to meet some new milbloggers, and I've been able to read some great new posts from some of my regular milblog friends. Without further ado, the links of the day:

1. Blog--The Huguenot Corsair. A gentleman named Duncan Kinder keeps an excellent blog regarding piracy, particularly in Africa, but also throughout the Mediterranean region and Asia.
   
2. Blog—Root Cause, Corrective Action, by someone I'll identify as Corey, a US Navy officer who is currently serving as an engineer in a Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) in Afghanistan. He has an amazing talent for photography; I highly recommend subscribing to his blog.
   
3. Blog—The Suppliants, by our very own Greg in Mexico, who discusses the narco-insurgency situation in that country. It's amazing that he can continue to work teaching at a school and ministering in the middle of the chaos, but he does.
   
4. The Kilcullen Doctrine by Zenpundit
   
5. Looks as if ISAF (International Security Assistance Force), the military actor in Afghanistan, is taking some advice from a recent SWJ/Foreign Policy article (quoted here at WOI) and is now putting out several "Tweets" per day.
   
6. More Afghan social networking. If you're a service member in Afghanistan, a site called "Why Afghanistan Matters" wants to hear from you about the important things the US is doing in Afghanistan. Check it out.
   

I'd also like to thank the gentlemen at Small Wars Journal for linking to a recent post of mine which was a call to action for junior officers to tell the Army how valuable sites like CompanyCommand and PlatoonLeader are. With the Army (rightfully) shifting its funding from the generating force to the operating force, every dollar should be looked at with a critical eye. Let's hope that our praise of these web tools is heard by those in charge of making the budgeting decisions, which I'm certain it will. Thousands have benefitted from these forums.

You may also notice, if you scroll down the page, that there is now a tracker embedded on the right hand side of the blog. I had no idea how much traffic I was getting, and from the sites they are coming from. I guess I shouldn't be surprised that my efforts to attract viewers with a picture of Megan Fox in a Star Wars T-shirt would be successful. That's guaranteed geek success. Even some Saudi Arabians are risking getting arrested by their local moral police by Google searching "Megan Fox Star Wars T-Shirt". Wonders never cease.

What I was surprised with, however, is how many people are coming here from Small Wars Journal and from Foreign Policy Online. I've also noticed that I'm getting a lot of visitors from the Washington DC area, and from Ft. Leavenworth in Kansas. I guess that means that either the Army's Combined Arms Center is checking me out, or the military prison is checking me out. Go figure…