The annual summer fighting season is now well underway in Afghanistan, with nearly daily suicide bombings, assassinations, and other high-profile attacks by the Taliban and other militant groups. But one thing appears decidedly different this time around to Lieutenant General Mark A. Milley, a native of Winchester who is now on his third tour and commands the International Security Assistance Force Joint Command: the Afghans are fighting back, mostly on their own. Read full story

The Air Force has a message for computer geeks: send us your resumes. At least that is the word from Mark Maybury, a computer scientist at the government-funded MITRE corporation in Bedford who was tapped in 2010 to serve as the chief scientist for the US Air Force. The Lowell native and Chelmsford resident, who will return from Washington to his old job this summer, says the Pentagon is struggling to maintain its technological edge in the realm of cyberspace. And a primary reason is a lack of new talent. “If you told me I want you to hire 1,000 cyber guys tomorrow, I’d count up all my friends and might have 60 or if really lucky might find 100,” he explained. “But 1,000?” Read full story

Representative Niki Tsongas, back from her fifth trip to Afghanistan, warned Wednesday that the strides made by Afghan women could be jeopardized by potential negotiations to reach a long-term peace agreement with the notoriously anti-female Taliban. “I am very concerned that the gains for women will be traded away given the Taliban’s fierce intent on marginalizing women, if not worse,” she said in an interview. “There is a lot of concern about the reconciliation process.” Read full story

The nation’s top spy on Monday requested a broad review into “the US government’s handling of intelligence information leading up to up to the Boston Marathon bombings,” according to an internal memo, the latest sign that top officials are concerned that critical warning signs may have been missed that could have prevented the worst terrorist attack on American soil since 9/11. Read full story

The former chief of the federal government’s information-sharing program said Friday that preliminary signs indicate authorities failed to give proper attention to one of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects after he was added to a terror watch list by the CIA, months after FBI investigators concluded he did not pose a threat. Read full story

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano on Wednesday said the twin bombings in Boston on Monday do not appear to be tied to a wider plot. “...There is no current indication to suggest that the attack was part of a larger plot,” she told the Senate Homeland Security Committee in previously scheduled testimony on her agency’s budget. Read full story

WASHINGTON _ Just a few months ago, Gary Samore was the White House architect of efforts to convince North Korea and Iran to foreswear nuclear weapons and strengthen international cooperation to prevent the further spread of catastrophic weapons, especially to terrorist groups. Read full story

It was exactly 40 years ago, on March 29, 1973, that Operation Barrel Roll -- the secret US bombing of Laos during the Vietnam War -- ended after nine years, more than a half a million bombing runs, and more than two million tons of ordnance dropped. But it is still claiming victims like Thoummy Silamphan, who is preparing to begin a nationwide tour next week organized by the nonprofit group Legacies of War to raise awareness -- and money -- to help remove the thousands of unexploded cluster bombs that still litter an estimated 30 percent of the Southeast Asian nation and have maimed or killed an estimated 20,000 civilians since the bombing ended. Read full story

Blistering charges of misplaced power and a morally bankrupt culture in the nation’s “military-industrial complex” are rarely leveled by one of the defense establishment’s own. But that is exactly what an instructor of the military’s rising stars lobbed on Tuesday when he very purposely engaged in friendly fire at a defense budget conference co-hosted by the Cambridge-based Project on Defense Alternatives. Read full story

“Any threat, any misson.” That’s the message Waltham-based defense giant Raytheon wants Congress to hear in these lean budget times when it is considering how much of the federal purse strings to let loose for the company’s latest suite of weapons and military technologies. For thousands of congressional staffers who commute to Capitol Hill each day it’s a message that is hard to forget. That’s because it’s all around them, in the form of new campaign by the one of the Pentagon’s top contractors to blanket the subway station just steps from the U.S. Capitol with ads for some of its most lucrative products. Read full story