Elisabeth Bumiller The New York Times

On a recent evening in a classroom at Yale, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal held forth for two animated hours on the conflicts in Northern Ireland and South Africa, with bits of his own history as the former top commander in Afghanistan thrown in. In earlier classes he covered the Bay of Pigs and Vietnam and, as his students tell it, recounted in mesmer...

Now it can be told: A prominent gay rights advocate who called himself J D Smith is in fact 1st Lt Josh Seefried, a 25-year-old active-duty Air Force officer. At 12:01 am on Tuesday, he dropped the pseudonym, freed from keeping his sexual orientation secret like an estimated tens of thousands of others in the United States military

The Defence Department suffered one of its worst digital attacks in history in March, when a foreign intelligence service hacked into the computer system of a corporate contractor and obtained 24,000 Pentagon files during a single intrusion, senior officials said Thursday. The disclosure came as the Pentagon released a strategy for military operati...

Marines were on a foot patrol last fall in the Taliban stronghold of Marja, Afghanistan, when they shot and killed a lethal threat: a local dog that made the mistake of attacking the Marines' Labrador retriever.Captain Manuel Zepeda, the commander of Company F, Second Battalion, Sixth Marines, was unapologetic. If the Lab on the patrol had been hur...

The world's most wanted terrorist lived his last five years imprisoned behind the barbed wire and high walls of his home in Abbottabad, Pakistan, his days consumed by dark arts and domesticity. American officials believe that Osama bin Laden spent many hours on the computer, relying on couriers to bring him thumb drives packed with information from...

On Monday, the Obama administration said that Osama bin Laden had been killed after a firefight with Navy Seal commandos, and that he had used his wife as a human shield. On Tuesday, the administration said that bin Laden was not armed at all, and that his wife had not been a shield, but had rushed her husband's assaulter and was shot in the leg.On...

There were 79 people on the assault team that killed Osama bin Laden, but in the end, the success of the mission turned on some two dozen men who landed inside the Qaeda leader's compound, made their way to his bedroom and shot him at close range -- all while knowing that the president of the United States was keeping watch from Washington. (Read: ...

Calling it a "good day for America," President Obama said on Monday that the death of Osama bin Laden had made the world "a better place," as new details emerged about the overnight raid and firefight in Pakistan that killed him. (Watch: Obama on Osama's death)"The world is safer," Mr. Obama said as he appeared at a White House ceremony bestowing ...

President Obama is expected this week to name Leon E. Panetta, the director of central intelligence, as defense secretary and Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top American commander in Afghanistan, as director of the C.I.A., administration officials said Wednesday. The appointments, set in motion by the impending retirement of Defense Secretary Robert M...

Overcoming internal squabbles, NATO prepared on Friday to assume leadership from the United States of the military campaign against Col. Moammar el-Gaddafi's forces, senior NATO officials said, while the allied effort won a rare military commitment in the Arab world when the United Arab Emirates said it would send warplanes to join patrols with Wes...

The United States and its allies shifted on Wednesday to ferocious airstrikes on Libyan ground forces, tanks and artillery, marking the second phase of a military campaign that drew the Pentagon deeper into the fight.A pounding from allied warplanes in the rebel-held city of Misurata forced Col. Moammar el-Gaddafi's troops to pull back for much of ...

An American pilot and a weapons officer were safely rescued in Libya on Tuesday after their warplane crashed near Benghazi, but the United States Marine Corps dropped two 500-pound bombs during the recovery and faced questions about whether Marines had fired on villagers. In an episode that reflected the unpredictability of an air campaign designed...

An American F-15E fighter jet crashed in Libya overnight and one crew member has been recovered while the other is "in the process of recovery," according to a spokesman for the American military's Africa Command and a British reporter who saw the wreckage.The crash was likely caused by mechanical failure and not hostile fire, the spokesman, Vince ...

An American-led military campaign to destroy Col. Muammar el-Gaddafi's air defenses and establish a no-fly zone over Libya has nearly accomplished its initial objectives, and the United States is moving swiftly to hand command to allies in Europe, American officials said Monday. But the firepower of more than 130 Tomahawk cruise missiles and attack...

After a second night of American and European strikes by air and sea against Col. Moammar el-Gaddafi's forces, European nations on Monday rejected Libyan claims that civilians had been killed. Pro-Gaddafi forces were reported, meanwhile, to be holding out against the allied campaign to break their hold on the ground while enforcing a no-fly zone.Re...

On a recent evening in a classroom at Yale, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal held forth for two animated hours on the conflicts in Northern Ireland and South Africa, with bits of his own history as the former top commander in Afghanistan thrown in. In earlier classes he covered the Bay of Pigs and Vietnam and, as his students tell it, recounted in mesmer...

Now it can be told: A prominent gay rights advocate who called himself J D Smith is in fact 1st Lt Josh Seefried, a 25-year-old active-duty Air Force officer. At 12:01 am on Tuesday, he dropped the pseudonym, freed from keeping his sexual orientation secret like an estimated tens of thousands of others in the United States military

The Defence Department suffered one of its worst digital attacks in history in March, when a foreign intelligence service hacked into the computer system of a corporate contractor and obtained 24,000 Pentagon files during a single intrusion, senior officials said Thursday. The disclosure came as the Pentagon released a strategy for military operati...

Marines were on a foot patrol last fall in the Taliban stronghold of Marja, Afghanistan, when they shot and killed a lethal threat: a local dog that made the mistake of attacking the Marines' Labrador retriever.Captain Manuel Zepeda, the commander of Company F, Second Battalion, Sixth Marines, was unapologetic. If the Lab on the patrol had been hur...

The world's most wanted terrorist lived his last five years imprisoned behind the barbed wire and high walls of his home in Abbottabad, Pakistan, his days consumed by dark arts and domesticity. American officials believe that Osama bin Laden spent many hours on the computer, relying on couriers to bring him thumb drives packed with information from...

On Monday, the Obama administration said that Osama bin Laden had been killed after a firefight with Navy Seal commandos, and that he had used his wife as a human shield. On Tuesday, the administration said that bin Laden was not armed at all, and that his wife had not been a shield, but had rushed her husband's assaulter and was shot in the leg.On...

There were 79 people on the assault team that killed Osama bin Laden, but in the end, the success of the mission turned on some two dozen men who landed inside the Qaeda leader's compound, made their way to his bedroom and shot him at close range -- all while knowing that the president of the United States was keeping watch from Washington. (Read: ...

Calling it a "good day for America," President Obama said on Monday that the death of Osama bin Laden had made the world "a better place," as new details emerged about the overnight raid and firefight in Pakistan that killed him. (Watch: Obama on Osama's death)"The world is safer," Mr. Obama said as he appeared at a White House ceremony bestowing ...

President Obama is expected this week to name Leon E. Panetta, the director of central intelligence, as defense secretary and Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top American commander in Afghanistan, as director of the C.I.A., administration officials said Wednesday. The appointments, set in motion by the impending retirement of Defense Secretary Robert M...

Overcoming internal squabbles, NATO prepared on Friday to assume leadership from the United States of the military campaign against Col. Moammar el-Gaddafi's forces, senior NATO officials said, while the allied effort won a rare military commitment in the Arab world when the United Arab Emirates said it would send warplanes to join patrols with Wes...

The United States and its allies shifted on Wednesday to ferocious airstrikes on Libyan ground forces, tanks and artillery, marking the second phase of a military campaign that drew the Pentagon deeper into the fight.A pounding from allied warplanes in the rebel-held city of Misurata forced Col. Moammar el-Gaddafi's troops to pull back for much of ...

An American pilot and a weapons officer were safely rescued in Libya on Tuesday after their warplane crashed near Benghazi, but the United States Marine Corps dropped two 500-pound bombs during the recovery and faced questions about whether Marines had fired on villagers. In an episode that reflected the unpredictability of an air campaign designed...

An American F-15E fighter jet crashed in Libya overnight and one crew member has been recovered while the other is "in the process of recovery," according to a spokesman for the American military's Africa Command and a British reporter who saw the wreckage.The crash was likely caused by mechanical failure and not hostile fire, the spokesman, Vince ...

An American-led military campaign to destroy Col. Muammar el-Gaddafi's air defenses and establish a no-fly zone over Libya has nearly accomplished its initial objectives, and the United States is moving swiftly to hand command to allies in Europe, American officials said Monday. But the firepower of more than 130 Tomahawk cruise missiles and attack...

After a second night of American and European strikes by air and sea against Col. Moammar el-Gaddafi's forces, European nations on Monday rejected Libyan claims that civilians had been killed. Pro-Gaddafi forces were reported, meanwhile, to be holding out against the allied campaign to break their hold on the ground while enforcing a no-fly zone.Re...