Last week, the Navy decommissioned the USS Jarrett, a guided-missile frigate. Time spent at sea sears memories, and I well recall the several days I spent aboard Jarrett in 2000, shadowing Commander Kathleen McGrath, the captain of the ship. She also happened to be the first woman in U.S. history to command a warship.
Trump to Obama: We’re Under Nuclear Attack – Pass the Phone to Biden
What would Donald Trump do if he were a nuclear emergency action officer on duty today at the war room in the Pentagon (the National Military Command Center) or its alternates, and a nuclear emergency erupted that required the President to be summoned by phone to consult with his top nuclear advisors about a possible response using …
The Little Engine That Shouldn’t
Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell tweets:
It took 2 SecDefs, 2 Admins & 5+ years, but Extra Engine contract finally terminated, saving taxpayers $1M per day.
The second engine proposal for the F-35 fighter, pushed by a GE-Rolls-Royce team, is finally dead. It shows Congress — when the Administration really fights for …
CBO Defense Option #1
Let’s cut the defense budget by…cutting the defense budget. This CBO chart shows that letting defense spending grow 1 percentage point less than now planned would save $67.3 billion over the next five years (that’s in outlays, the actually money spent in a given year [think of it as buying something with a check], not budget …
57%
Jacques Gansler, a former top Pentagon official who has helped the Defense Science Board study military procurement for a DSB report coming out this week, testified Monday on Capitol Hill. One of the problems in Pentagon contracting, he said, is that the military is buying more services (engineering, accounting, security, management) …
More CBO on Defense Options
Brass Creep: Too Many Generals at the Air Force?
Over at the POGO blog, I flagged a compelling Air Force Times investigation into the the explosion of the top ranks of flag officers at the Air Force, a pet peeve of the SECDEF. To whet your appetite, check out this nugget from the Air Force Times story: “In the last seven years alone, the service has shed nearly 43,000 airmen while …
Nuke Modernization – Wrong Priority
Why should we (and Secretary of Defense Gates in particular) be talking about modernizing all elements of the U.S. strategic triad of nuclear-armed submarines, land-based rockets, and bombers if we (President Obama in particular) have a decent chance of negotiating the total elimination — Global Zero — of all of the world’s nuclear …
CBO On Defense Options
Every year, the green eye-shade crowd at the Congressional Budget Office takes its weed-whacker to the federal budget in its poetically-titled Reducing the Deficit: Spending and Revenue Options. The CBO doesn’t make any recommendations about what its masters — those would be the members of Congress — should do. It simply lists some …
More on that Afghan Prison Break
Time‘s John Wendle has more depressing news on that jail break in Afghanistan early Monday that allegedly sprung more than 100 Taliban commanders from the slammer in Kandahar. He also reports on the U.S. military’s reaction to the fiasco:
“Basically, there’s an order out to arrest anyone walking around barefoot in Kandahar City.”
U.S. Libya Policy: “Profound Illogicality”
Time editor Michael Elliot weighs in on what he sees as President Obama’s muddled Libya policy:
I argued a couple of weeks ago that there is a profound illogicality at the heart of this policy. If a regime is treating its people so monstrously that military intervention from the outside is justified, then it is ludicrous to suppose that
…
Competition Hyping WikiLeaks’ Gitmo-Docs Dump?
Having skimmed the WikiLeaks release on Guantanamo Bay this morning, still difficult to see why the Times and Post have given it such prominence in their morning editions. You know part of it is the allure of the classified stamp, and the continuing fascination with those who committed 9/11.
But their headlines reveal the dirty little …
