Staff Sgt. Christopher Fessenden is on duty in Afghanistan now after tours with the Army in Iraq. He has traveled with standard-issue equipment — weapons, helmet, uniform, boots and so forth — plus a radio-controlled model truck his brother Ernie sent.

…Chris Fessenden said he had loaned the truck to a group of fellow soldiers, who used it to check the road ahead of them on a patrol. It got tangled in a trip wire connected to what Fessenden guesses could have been 500 lbs. of explosives. The bomb went off. The six soldiers controlling the truck from their Humvee were unhurt. [via ABC News]

The White Stripes and their management have accused the Air Force Reserve of swiping “Fell in Love with a Girl” for a recruitment commercial that aired during the Super Bowl. “We believe our song was re-recorded and used without permission of the White Stripes, our publishers, label or management,” the band writes in a statement on their official Website. “We have not licensed this song to the Air Force Reserve and we plan to take strong action to stop the ad containing this music.” Watch the offending commercial on the Air Force Reserve site.

A comparison of the White Blood Cells single and the Air Force Reserve commercial reveals that the music is nearly exactly the same, with Jack White’s guitar riffs firmly intact and another guitar replicating the cadence of the original vocal medley.

n what may be the worst military reproductive rights policy yet (and there’s a lot of competition), one general has decided that soldiers under his command can be court-martialed and jailed for getting pregnant.

But as military law professor Eugene Fidell points out, “Here you really have issues that go to the core of personal integrity: reproductive rights.” In addition to the basic issue of whether pregnancy should ever be a criminal offense, the policy has a number of upsetting implications. Enforcement will likely disproportionately affect women, as it’s much easier to tell who’s pregnant than who impregnated her. And there’s no apparent provision for women who are raped. Add this to the fact that military bases aren’t required to provide emergency contraception, and that abortions are banned at military hospitals, and you have an environment where women are both forced to remain pregnant and punished for doing so.

I know it’s the military, but this is barbaric.

(via Jezebel)

According to military experts Donna McAleer and Erin Solaro’s op-ed in The Washington Post, “twenty-five percent of military jobs are not open to women, and those jobs lead disproportionately to higher command.” They do see some positive signs: women may be integrated into the submarine fleet, and in their minds “the feared ‘disasters’ [of female soldiers in combat zones] did not materialize.” But they cite, disapprovingly, Tom Ricks’ reporting that the U.S. is underutilizing its female soldiers in Afghanistan, showing that “one of the chief barriers to fully utilizing servicewomen in counterinsurgency operations in Afghanistan is not Afghan but American attitudes… female soldiers and Marines have reportedly had more success gaining access to Afghan women than male troops have had.”