Although Prince Harry’s marriage last week to Ms. Meghan Markle was not a military occasion, the groom and best man wore uniform and more than 250 servicemen from units with storied military histories took part, so I think it’s acceptable to report on it for Military History in the News.

Somewhere that military history is constantly in the news—or at least in the newspapers—is in the obituaries of old soldiers. With the generation who comprised the generals and colonels from World War II now almost completely gone, it is the officers from later conflicts who tend to feature now. In the London Times last week, the death notice of Colonel John Cormack, a mining expert who won the Military Cross in the King’s Royal Irish Hussars in the Korean War, reminds us that that conflict never formally ended with a peace treaty, but only sputtered out with an armistice.

The phrase “the struggle for Turkey’s soul” once served as shorthand for the perceived conflict between the country’s secular democratic values and Muslim religious values. With the July 8, 2018 inauguration of Recep Tayyip Erdogan as Turkey’s President, democratic values and Muslim values now struggle with hyper-empowered Erdogan’s personal political goals and his devilish acquisition of authoritarian power.

An article in the British Daily Mail was entitled “Did the British plant a bomb at the 1940 World’s Fair to kill two NYPD officers and bring the U.S. into World War II?” It was one of those classic newspaper headlines to which the answer is “No,” but which helps sell papers anyhow. The bomb that went off on July 4, 1940 was originally planted in the British pavilion of the World’s Fair in New York, which also contained the Crown Jewels and an original copy of the Magna Carta, and a member of the pro-Nazi Bund organization was deported over the incident.

Not one inch. With these words, Secretary of State James Baker proposed a hypothetical bargain to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev after the fall of the Berlin Wall: if you give up your part of Germany, NATO will “not shift one inch eastward.”

The Hoover Institution Press released Andrei Sakharov: The Conscience of Humanity, edited by George P. Shultz, the Thomas W. and Susan B. Ford Distinguished Fellow, and Senior Fellow Sidney Drell. 

It may be stretching the limits of this feature to offer a movie review as “Military History in the News,” but, given the temper of our times, any film even slightly to do with Britain’s greatest soldier, John Churchill Duke of Marlborough, ought to be welcomed. And in fact, The Favourite has been widely acclaimed as one of the best offerings of the year. Deliciously filmed by director Yorgos Lanthimos, The Favourite tells, albeit in a gossipy way, the tale of Queen Anne’s epic feud with Sarah Churchill, the duke’s wife, the queen’s longtime “favorite,” and ruthlessly Machiavellian power behind the throne. 

Tim Kane, JP Conte Fellow in Immigration Studies at Hoover, discussed his research for his forthcoming Hoover Press book, Total Volunteer Force, that offers a blueprint for Pentagon personnel reform, including the Leader/Talent analytical survey and reform ideas for jobmatching, compensation, and performance reviews.

Press coverage of President Trump’s national security team has routinely described Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, White House chief of staff John Kelly, and Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster as “the generals.” It is a convenient framing for those who fear a Trump presidency, for whom the three constitute “the adults in the room,” or alternatively the sinister undercurrent to military predominance in policy making, and for the President’s supporters, for whom the three are proof of the President’s seriousness of purpose.