Jared Keller is a senior editor at Task and Purpose. A contributing editor at Pacific Standard magazine, he has previously worked for The Atlantic, Bloomberg Digital, Al Jazeera America, and Maxim. His work has also appeared in Aeon, Entrepreneur, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Outside, Slate, Smithsonian, Vice, the Village Voice, and many other outlets. Follow him on Twitter at @jaredbkeller
The SB-1 Defiant is finally here and ready to party.
After years of delays, Boeing and Sikorsky's unusual coaxial rotor helicopter conducted its first flight in the skies above Florida on Thursday, the companies announced.
Former Nebraska Sen. Bob Kerrey wants President Donald Trump to prove that the bone spurs that purportedly kept him from serving in the U.S. armed forces during the Vietnam War are real.
An aerial view of the flooding at the Camp Ashland, Nebraska on March 17, 2019. The levee to the north of the camp broke and water from the swollen Platte River poured thousands of gallons of water into the low-lying area trapping vehicles on the high ground and damaging buildings. (Nebraska National Guard/Staff Sgt. Herschel Talley)
Offutt Air Force Base wasn't the only U.S. military installation engulfed by the floodwaters that have spread across the Midwest.
Camp Ashland, a major regional Army National Guard education and training facility that sits on the banks of the Platte River in eastern Nebraska, has been rendered non-operational after being deluged by rising floodwaters, Nebraska National Guard spokesman Lt. Col. Kevin Hynes told Task & Purpose.
"I've been in the armed forces for 33 years, 29 with the Nebraska National Guard," Hynes said. "I've never seen an emergency like this in my time, and nobody I know has ever seen anything of this scope."
In February, the commander of the U.S. Naval Air Forces proclaimed that the Navy's F-35C Joint Strike Fighter was "ready for operations, ready for combat and ready to win" — even though the Navy's own testing data says otherwise.
A Ruger AR-15 semi-automatic rifle, center, the same model, though in gray rather than black, used by the shooter in a Texas church massacre two days earlier, sits on display with other rifles on a wall in a gun shop Tuesday, Nov. 7, 2017, in Lynnwood, Wash. (Associated Press/Elaine Thompson)
A new bill introduced in the Missouri House of Representatives would require a significant number of state residents own "at least one" AR-15 semi-automatic rifle with the help of a hefty tax break — except it won't ever get off the ground.
Afghan National Army soldiers practice the prone shooting position during a class given by coalition force members on the fundamentals of marksmanship in Farah province, Feb. 14, 2013. (U.S. Marine Corps/Sgt. Chadwick de Bree)
Members of the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces frequently robbed and abused native Afghan personnel hired under three maintenance and operations contracts at ANDSF military bases, according to an alarming new report from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, confiscating a total of $780,000 in property and equipment and often detaining workers at gunpoint.
More disturbingly, the Resolute Support mission's Combined Security Transition Command - Afghanistan "has not issued any financial penalties against the ANDSF" for the mistreatment of its O&M because withholding funds, according to the SIGAR report "harms ANDSF forces more than it would tend to change behavior" of corrupt security forces.
