In addition to an aggressive goatee, Gulmurod Khalimov has a certain set of skills. He commands Tajikistan’s special forces, trained and funded by American military whizzes. Or he did, before recently turning up in a YouTube video saying he’s gone to Syria to fight with the Islamic State.

A soon-to-be-released military audit will reveal that “a number of Pentagon employees” gambled and solicited escorts in Atlantic City and Las Vegas on the taxpayer dime, prompting one U.S. senator to remind civil servants not to use their government credit cards “for prostitutes.”

Jet jockeys gotta be able to see. I mean, once their jet gets off the ground, which the F-35 will, eventually, at some point in the next two decades, after 19 years and a trillion or so dollars in development. In the meantime, check out this boss helmet for F-35 pilots that costs about as much as a city in South Dakota.

It's no Desert Storm. It's not even Desert Fox. It wishes it was Desert Crossing. It can't be Operation Iraqi Freedom, since we've used that, although it could be Operation Freedom Is Messy. The point is: U.S. war planners now say they need a name for this thing that's totally not a war, but a "targeted operation."

Pentagon officials announced over the weekend that they'd executed some kind of an air-strike operation against members of Al-Shabaab, an Islamist militant group in Somalia, because apparently defense planners are really used to multitasking at this point, and it feels weird now to just bomb one thing, you know?