Combat

KABUL, Afghanistan -- A suicide bomber killed three German soldiers and seven bystanders in the northern city of Kunduz yesterday, inflicting the worst casualties on German troops in Afghanistan in nearly four years. Three soldiers and more than a dozen other people were wounded in the attack in a crowded marketplace. German troops are deployed mainly in Afghanistan's relatively calm north. Despite appeals from other NATO countries, German leaders have refused to make them available for a broader combat role.

As of yesterday, at least 3,019 members of the U.S. military have died since March 2003. Identifications Sgt. Aron C. Blum, 22, Tucson, Ariz.; died Dec. 28 at Naval Medical Center, San Diego, of a noncombat-related cause after being evacuated from Anbar province Dec. 8; assigned to Marine Aerial Refueler Transport Squadron 352, Marine Aircraft Group 11, 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing, I Marine Expeditionary Force; Marine Corps Air Station Miramar, Calif....

FORT DIX, N.J. -- Plumes of red and yellow signal smoke wafted over this Army base's training range yesterday as dozens of Maryland National Guardsmen learned how to perfect the coordinated firing of .50-caliber machine guns. They paused only to cover a convoy of friendly Humvees snaking through the sandy pine forest filled with snipers and roadside bombs. It is a scene similar to ones played out by hundreds of thousands of service members who have prepared for a war now in its fifth year.

WASHINGTON -- President Bush outlined a tactical shift to the U.S. war in Iraq last night, but the basic strategy remains in place: a long-term and high-risk effort to simultaneously stabilize Iraq's most violent neighborhoods while training Iraqi security forces to take over the job, administration officials, military officers and analysts said. The refocused campaign, which will double the American combat forces in Baghdad, is expected to be long, difficult and bloody, according to the plan's authors.

Amilitary judge on Guantanamo didn't even wait to get a request from the defense yesterday before tossing out the government's terrorism charges against a young Canadian Muslim held prisoner there for the past five years. The defendant, Omar Khadr, hadn't properly been found to be an "unlawful enemy combatant" by a previous panel - and this is of major significance because apparently neither has anyone else currently incarcerated at the U.S. prison camp. The ruling is a vindication of sorts for the military tribunal system set up last year by the Bush administration and the previous Congress in an attempt to evade the Geneva Conventions and the U.S. Constitution - but not in the way that its authors intended.

WASHINGTON -- President Bush, members of Congress and virtually all counterterrorism experts have acknowledged that defeating terrorists cannot be accomplished solely by dropping bombs on them. Ultimately, they say, ending terrorism will come only by addressing its underlying causes. "Our long-term strategy to keep the peace is to help change the conditions that give rise to extremism and terror by spreading the universal principle of human liberty," Bush said in March 2005. But a close look at the United States' counterterrorism priorities shows a strategy going in the opposite direction.

WASHINGTON - He is dressed in the crow-like uniform of late '90s hip: black sport coat over a black T-shirt, eyes peering through small black wire-rims.With his tangle of white hair and hollow voice, like a low, steady note of a flute, this lanky figure could pass for some aging poet or film director. But his small lapel pin - a flintlock on a pale blue field bordered by a wreath - tells of a different occupation.It is the Combat Infantryman's Badge, the "CIB" to veterans, the prized possession of the grunt who has been in the thick of the fighting.

They grew up in suburban Baltimore and graduated a year apart at the U.S. Naval Academy, two midshipmen enduring a regimented life in the same huge stone dormitory. Now, they are warriors cloistered below deck on an aircraft carrier in the Adriatic Sea.Praying.For Chris and Aaron, fighter-bomber pilots on the carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt, their first combat mission began on an early-April night in the closet-sized chaplain's office one level below the flight deck.The senior pilots were the first chosen for combat, launching into the inky blackness and arcing toward targets in Yugoslavia.

WASHINGTON -- There will be no combat-ready F-22 fighter planes produced next year, but the Pentagon can buy up to six test versions of the jet under a compromise military spending plan that House and Senate negotiators agreed to last night.The plan both saves the Lockheed Martin-built aircraft from a proposed cut that supporters said would kill it and requires the contractor to test the complex plane more thoroughly before the Pentagon commits to buying it.A House-Senate conference committee produced the plan as part of a $267.

Capt. Scott Lageman of the Maryland Air National Guard pats the flank of his Maverick missile, checks the safety pins on his BDU-33 bombs and climbs into a titanium bathtub with a 30 mm Gatling gun protruding from its belly.After climbing into the cockpit of his A-10 "Warthog" tank-killing fighter-bomber, Lageman taxis down the runway and lifts the lumbering jet into a steel-gray sky piled with clouds.Lageman and 1,700 other members of the Guard's 175th Wing, based at Martin State Airport in Middle River, are training for the possibility that President Clinton will send them to the Balkans to bomb Yugoslav troops.

Once again, the debate over women fighting in combat positions has found its way to the forefront of American discourse - and frankly, it's time. Today's military operates in combat zones with no front lines and where achieving victory is ultimately decided not through bullets but through relationship building with local populations. Limiting a segment of the American population because of gender from participating in the full spectrum of engagement hurts the nation's ability to achieve mission success.

BAGHDAD -The U.S. Army has quietly altered or abandoned some of its more experimental medical treatments for troops injured in combat, as advances it once hailed as groundbreaking are found largely ineffective or perhaps even dangerous. Advanced battle dressings, a blood-clotting drug, alternative procedures for emergency blood transfusions - each was introduced early in the Iraq war, often with little evidence to support them beyond anecdotes or tests on animals. A few were adopted widely by civilian hospitals, based almost exclusively on accolades from the military.

Capt. Brian M. Bunting was a star athlete from Potomac, a West Point graduate, a man who could be serious and disciplined. But the first thing that hits you when looking through his pictures is the smile: A huge, toothy, goofy grin. Bunting, 29, a member of the Individual Ready Reserve assigned to the 27th Infantry Brigade Combat Team in Syracuse, N.Y., was killed in Kandahar, Afghanistan, on Tuesday when a bomb exploded near his vehicle. Three other soldiers also died in the attack. It was Bunting's first combat tour as a ready reservist, one of a pool of soldiers who have completed their service but remain available for call-up when needed.

George Norman Anderson Jr., a retired civil engineer who was a decorated Army veteran and former prisoner of war, died of congestive heart failure Monday at the Veterans Affairs Rehabilitation and Extended Care Center in Baltimore. The Towson resident was 89. Born in Baltimore and raised on Allendale Road, he was a 1937 graduate of Polytechnic Institute, where he played lacrosse. His family owned and operated boys and girls summer camps in Vermont, where he learned horsemanship, became the riding instructor and gained an interest in polo.

Deadly A-10 warplanes armed with the latest precision-bombing technology are thundering over Baltimore at an accelerating pace as National Guard pilots from Maryland and other states train here to deploy early next year with the Obama administration's expected military buildup in Afghanistan. Officers said the planes will fly there in stages next winter for a combat tour of three to six months. Joining them will be the Maryland Air Guard's C-130J airlift cargo planes and crews. The A-10 attack jets of Maryland's Air National Guard were the first in the nation to be fitted with the new digital-linked targeting and fire-control systems.

WASHINGTON - Top Army officers are concerned that a growing number of soldiers are medically unfit to deploy to war, a development that could affect President Barack Obama's campaign vow to increase U.S. combat forces in Afghanistan. At least 20,000 Army soldiers are on "nondeployable" status, a number that has grown by several thousand in the past six months, the Army's vice chief of staff, Gen. Peter Chiarelli, told reporters yesterday. Many have muscle or bone injuries from carrying heavy loads in combat, Chiarelli said.

WASHINGTON - In his first full day in the White House, President Barack Obama pushed his top military advisers for a plan to withdraw combat troops from Iraq and, in an extraordinary exercise, took the oath of office a second time over concern about a miscue during his swearing-in. Obama retook the oath before a handful of aides in the White House Map Room - 31 1/2 hours after he spoke the words on the West Front of the Capitol before more than a million people arrayed on the Mall. In the first go-round, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. botched the wording, deviating from the language in the Constitution.

Col. James Curtis Burris, a highly decorated career Army officer who fought in the Vietnam War, died Nov. 13 at his Havre de Grace home of cancers related to exposure to Agent Orange. He was 78. Colonel Burris, who was born and raised in Tulsa, Okla., graduated from Tulsa Central High School in 1948. Born into a military family, Colonel Burris was the grandson of two Civil War veterans and the son of a World War I veteran. He enlisted in the Army in 1948 and was selected to attend the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., from which he graduated with a bachelor's degree in engineering in 1954.

SOACHA, Colombia - Julian Oviedo, a 19-year-old construction worker in this gritty patchwork of slums, told his mother on March 2 that he was going to talk to a man about a job offer. A day later, Oviedo was shot dead by army troops some 350 miles to the north. He was classified as a subversive and registered as a combat kill. Colombia's government, the Bush administration's top ally in Latin America, has been buffeted by the killings of Oviedo and dozens of other young, impoverished men and women whose cases have come to light in recent weeks.

Until recently, America's combat casualties seemed easy to count. Most came home with visible infirmities. Now, it's apparent there has been a much larger toll, a hidden army of casualties with post-traumatic stress disorder. Last week Pentagon officials reported 115 Army suicides last year, the highest rate on record. They revealed the number of troops diagnosed with PTSD jumped by 50 percent and expressed concern that that the nearly 40,000 stricken soldiers were only a small fraction of the malady's victims.