WASHINGTON, Feb. 16 (UPI) -- The Iran-Iraq War ended 21 years ago. It was amazingly ignored at the time by the mainstream U.S. media and pundits, and in the light of the two super-successful, blitzkrieg U.S. victories over Iraq in the 1991 and 2003 Gulf wars, it has been largely ignored since. Yet that bloody "forgotten war" killed more than 1 million people and was filled with crucial tactical, strategic and procurement lessons for the U.S. armed forces and other militaries in the 21st century.

WASHINGTON, Dec. 11 (UPI) -- Former U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other officials "redefined the law" to allow the use of torture, a report released Thursday said.

WASHINGTON, Dec. 8 (UPI) -- Barack Obama's selection of former Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric K. Shinseki as his first secretary of veterans affairs is a political coup that solves several political domestic problems for the president-elect. It also sends a strong signal to the world about the very different form the U.S. government's policymaking apparatus will take in the new administration.

WASHINGTON, Dec. 7 (UPI) -- Eric Shinseki is about to set up shop in the same White House, which under U.S. President George Bush, disregarded his warnings about Iraq troop levels.

WASHINGTON, Nov. 26 (UPI) -- President-elect Barack Obama is said to be asking Robert Gates to stay on at least a year longer as U.S. secretary of defense. The move may anger many liberals among Obama's base, but it looks likely to be widely welcomed in the U.S. armed forces and the Pentagon.

WASHINGTON, Nov. 10 (UPI) -- Prompted by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Internet revolution, Network Centric Warfare has become one of the latest iterations in attempts by the Department of Defense to formulate a coherent framework to transform our military forces and address future threats. It became the centerpiece of former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's attempt to transform the U.S. military.

WASHINGTON, Oct. 31 (UPI) -- Former U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld entered office at a time of apparently infinite possibilities. He pursued many of them but achieved almost none of them.

WASHINGTON, Sept. 22 (UPI) -- Larger wars between major industrial powers, of course, destroy lots of weapons systems as well as lots of people. That is why major powers still need lots of soldiers and lots of relatively cheap, easily manufactured and easily replaced weapons systems.

ARLINGTON, Va., Sept. 10 (UPI) -- U.S. presidential campaigns are so much about posturing that it's easy to miss what's really going on. Take national security policy. Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Barack Obama, D-Ill., want you to think they represent diametrically opposed approaches to national security, when in fact they have quite similar views.