John Barry

It must be one of the most repulsive home movies ever made. Osama bin Laden chuckles contentedly over slaughtering his own men along with several thousand Americans, while his flunkies kiss up to him like junior executives at bonus time.

The 2,200 troops of the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit are cooped up on the assault ship USS Peleliu, presumably itching for action. If they ever go ashore, it's as likely to be in Pakistan as Afghanistan.

Commander Rakhmad Gol is enjoying himself. For the past six years he's been fighting a frustrating war against the Taliban, usually enduring defeat, sometimes making small but costly gains of territory.

Special Forces Open The Ground War. The Making Of Elite Fighters--And The Battle They Face

In the military, which has an acronym for everything, there are a number of ways to express, by means of abbreviated profanity, that things are not going well.

It is usually the disasters that people remember. In 1979 it was the helicopters of Desert One lying burned and gutted in the Iranian desert; inside were eight dead Delta Force commandos and pilots who never got off the ground in a botched effort to rescue the hostages in Tehran.

George W. Bush had promised the war on terrorism would be a war like no other, and on Sunday he delivered. Striking a blow for the hearts and minds of Muslims at the same time he struck Afghanistan, the president fired the opening salvos of Operation Enduring Freedom at midday.

Afghanistan is a country of jagged ridges and deep gorges that is about the size of Texas. It is nature's gift to guerrilla warfare. And for centuries it has been known as the place where great powers go to die.

U.S. military sources have given the FBI information that suggests five of the alleged hijackers of the planes that were used in Tuesday's terror attacks received training at secure U.S. military installations in the 1990s.Three of the alleged hijackers listed their address on drivers licenses and car registrations as the Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Fla.-known as the "Cradle of U.S. Navy Aviation," according to a high-ranking U.S. Navy source.Another of the alleged hijackers may have been...

Last week British paratrooper Ian Collins, 22, was killed on the first day that NATO began collecting weapons from Albanian guerrillas in Macedonia. Officials blamed a gang of youths who threw a concrete slab off a bridge onto a British jeep.

President George W. Bush's talk of "a new relationship" with Russia in which the cold-war standoff gives way to "a new strategic paradigm." Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is in Moscow this week, in fact, for talks tying U.S. missile defenses to deep cuts in nuclear weapons.

The 20-minute briefing at the White House last month was dry and crammed with statistics and acronyms, but it got the president's attention. The U.S. nuclear arsenal today includes 5,400 warheads loaded on intercontinental ballistic missiles at land and sea; an additional 1,750 nuclear bombs and cruise missiles ready to be launched from B-2 and B-52 bombers; a further 1,670 nuclear weapons classified as "tactical." And just in case, an additional 10,000 or so nuclear warheads held in bunkers...

In a city where few stars shine for longer than a presidential term or two, Andrew Marshall has inhabited the same set of dingy offices in the Pentagon (suite 3A930), just down the hall from the secretary of Defense (3E880), for the past 28 years.

President Bush's team of top-level officials fans out across Europe this week to begin selling the Administration's ideas for a new nuclear strategy and the case for missile defenses.

When Disney Productions descended on Hawaii last year to film its forthcoming movie about Pearl Harbor, director Michael Bay was ecstatic at the condition of the U.S. naval base there. "Admiral, this is great," he said to the commander of U.S. forces in the Pacific, Adm.

Sulejman Ramadani, 41, was opening his garage door one day last week when a sniper's bullet pierced his forehead. Now the engineer's two sons, 4 and 2, have no father.

It was the biggest accomplishment of his first solo trip abroad, but Secretary of State Colin Powell didn't seem triumphant. Traveling to Damascus at a time when the United States has few friends in the Arab world, Powell extracted a pledge from Syrian leader Bashar Assad to plug the gap Assad's nation had opened in U.N.

Donald Rumsfeld is not exactly the sort of man a Georgetown hostess would describe as "cozy." While he's charming when he wants to be, the former Princeton football and wrestling captain and Navy pilot has been known through his long career as a tough infighter.

Stories that people tell about Colin Powell always seem to have the same ending. Like the time in 1972 when Powell, then a newly minted major in the Army, was trying out for a prestigious White House fellowship.

Prescription Drugs Bush and Gore both have plans to help the estimated 13 million seniors who lack prescription-drug coverage--and the candidates offer voters a real choice of approaches.

The letter came from a steel tomb on the floor of the Barents Sea. "All personnel from compartments six, seven and eight moved to the ninth," wrote a round-faced, 27-year-old naval officer, Lt.

The floor of the Barents Sea at 69'40" north, 37'35" east, is a place of pure, disorienting darkness. Shine a light and mostly what you'd see is decomposing matter--dead plankton, particles from old skins shed by crustaceans, bits of waste from marine life above--what divers call "marine snow." The term is doubly apt because arctic water is very cold here, 35 to 40 degrees Fahrenheit.

It was classic Bill Clinton, the statesman as salesman. As he toured the capitals of Europe last week on his way to a Moscow summit, he smoothly tried to sell America's allies on the concept of a national missile defense.

Veterans of operation desert Storm sometimes call the Battle of Rumaylah the Battle of the Junkyard, because when it was over, the battlefield was scattered with the burned-out remains of 600 Iraqi tanks, armored personnel carriers, guns and trucks.

It was acclaimed as the most successful air campaign ever. "A turning point in the history of warfare," wrote the noted military historian John Keegan, proof positive that "a war can be won by airpower alone." At a press conference last June, after Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic agreed to pull his Army from Kosovo at the end of a 78-day aerial bombardment that had not cost the life of a single NATO soldier or airman, Defense Secretary William Cohen declared, "We severely crippled the...

The battle of Grozny was long and bloody--for Russian attackers as well as the Chechen defenders. But you won't see any condescending head-wagging in the U.S. military.

Gen. Eric Shinseki, chief of staff of the Army, looks and sounds like the future. A Japanese-American, the first nonwhite to hold the Army's top command post, he talks about the need to "transform" the Army into a leaner, quicker fighting force that can go anywhere in the world on short notice.

Nawaz Sharif was democratically elected, but he isn't a democrat. The former Pakistani prime minister, ousted last week in a military coup, acted more like a despot after his landslide election victory in 1997.

The U.S. Senate debate on the comprehensive Test Ban Treaty lived down to expectations. As usual when nuclear weapons are the topic, both sides hyped their cases and avoided real issues.

The Democrats thought they had a deal. At 2:30 last Tuesday afternoon, Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle told his colleagues that he had just shaken hands with Republican leader Trent Lott.