Craig Whitlock

Senior U.S. officials said the Pentagon fell victim to the conceit that it could build from scratch an enormous Afghan army and police force with 350,000 personnel.

A long-percolating feud between Navy brass and the Senate has erupted into open conflict, with the retired admiral who oversaw the daring 2011 raid that killed Osama bin Laden publicly accusing lawmakers of harboring deep disrespect for military leaders.

Major accidents hit a record high last year, straining the fleet even as the number of counterterrorism missions — and war zones — rises. And the accident rate has spiked mysteriously for the Reaper, a 2 1/2-ton "hunter-killer" that is prone to lose power and drop from the sky.

Toy drones are starting to interfere with military operations at several bases across the country. With sales of consumer drones expected to approach 700,000 this year, military officials say they are bracing for the problem to get worse.

The Air Force revolutionized drone warfare. Now it's finding itself on the defensive.

A CIA drone strike in January that was aimed at a suspected al-Qaida compound in Pakistan accidentally killed two hostages, including a kidnapped American, U.S. officials acknowledged Thursday.

The U.S. commando raid that killed Osama bin Laden was guided from space by a fleet of satellites, which aimed dozens of separate receivers over Pakistan to collect a torrent of electronic and signals intelligence as the mission unfolded, according to a top-secret U.S. intelligence document.

Military recruiters across the country have been caught in a string of sex-crime scandals over the past year, exposing another long-standing problem for the Defense Department as it grapples with a crisis of sexual assault in the ranks.

A female Air Force general has run afoul of Congress for granting clemency to a convicted sex offender without any public explanation, the latest case to raise fundamental questions about how the military justice system handles sex crimes.

A June 1 attack on a U.S. outpost near the Afghanistan-Pakistan border was much worse than originally disclosed by the military as insurgents pounded the base with a truck bomb, killing two Americans, including a soldier based at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, and seriously wounding about three dozen troops, officials acknowledged Saturday.

Military investigators were combing through a U.S. Army sergeant's personnel and medical records to determine what might have caused him to slip away from his base in southern Afghanistan and massacre 16 sleeping villagers.