You’re in the military. You blew the whistle. Something bad happened to your career. You ask your military service Inspector General or the big Department of Defense Inspector General (DoD IG) to investigate what you believe is reprisal. You’re in good hands, right? Well, maybe not.
There are numerous problems with how …
File under: Doesn’t make a lick of sense. Thanks to a change stemming from the 2007 defense authorization law, retired generals and admirals can, under the right circumstances, make more in retirement than they can while actually working for the military. USA Today’s Tom Vanden Brook has the scoop:
The highest pension, $272,892, is
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On Friday last week, Raytheon, a major defense contractor, announced it scored a four-star general! Marine Corps Gen. (Ret.) James E. Cartwright, the recently departed vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, joined the …
President Obama didn’t mention them. Nor did Defense Secretary Leon Panetta. No word on them by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey either. Deputy Secretary of Defense Ash Carter? Didn’t happen. Under Secretary of Defense Michèle Flournoy? Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs James Winnefeld? Nope. Nada.
Who wasn’t …
Americans often believe government bureaucracy often prevails over common sense. This certainly happened to the Air Force earlier this year, when it sought to avoid embarrassment by curtailing its workforce’s communications …
The Air Force has been busy adding more generals. But the same has been happening across the Defense Department, although the overall DoD growth isn’t quite as striking as it is within the Air Force alone. In a post this afternoon on the POGO blog, my colleague Ben Freeman wrote that:
Seventeen general and flag officers were scheduled
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A senior auditor with the Defense Contract Audit Agency (DCAA) was subjected to years of reprisal in violation of the Whistleblower Protection Act after she blew the whistle on flawed audits produced by DCAA, according to an April 2010 Office of Special Counsel (OSC) investigative report made available today by the Project On Government …
The Pentagon’s top official for weapons testing sent a sternly worded letter warning the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) program and the Air Force that their plans to start unmonitored flight training on the Air Force variant of the JSF F-35 this fall “risks the occurrence of a serious mishap,” according to an October 21 memo, first …
Ben Freeman, my colleague at the Project On Government Oversight (POGO), published a piece in The Hill’s website today that debunks myths surrounding the debt deal and defense spending. Check it out.
In the chain-of-command-oriented military, whistleblowers rarely fare well.
Each year, hundreds of uniformed members of the military send official complaints to Inspectors General (IGs) within the Department of Defense (DoD) saying that they are the targets of reprisal. Most do not have their claims of reprisal …
Democratic Senator Tom Carper of Delaware fired off a letter to Defense Secretary Leon Panetta today asking Panetta to “look in every nook and cranny of the federal government to make sure that we’re getting the most bang for our buck.” Panetta has been aggressively fighting the prospect of cuts to the Defense Department’s budget. But …
Despite vast Republican opposition on federal spending to create jobs (“stimulus”), some Republicans (and, surprise!, defense contractors and defense contractor-funded consultant Loren Thompson) support federal spending on defense to create jobs or to support the ones that already exist, i.e. protecting the defense industrial base. For …
To extend on Mark’s post on the growth in generals and admirals relative to the number of troops they command, Democratic Senator Jim Webb of Virginia, who presided over the Senate hearing, provided the following in a press release:
“Where is it decided and how is it decided that each of these services has the justification or the
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