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
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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 …
Progress
A Constellation of Bronze Stars
Here’s something you don’t see every day: a U.S. bomb-disposal expert getting three Bronze Stars pinned on for a single tour. It happened April 18 at Hill Air Force Base, Utah, where Master Sgt. Benjamin Horton collected the trio for his heroics as an explosive ordnance disposal team leader. The citations for the medals lauded Horton …
Afghan Jailbreak
Meanwhile, back in the here and now, the Taliban staged a massive jailbreak in Kandahar early Monday that spirited at least 476 prisoners out of the biggest prison in southern Afghanistan. “We do not know if the tunnel was dug from outside or inside the prison,” the warden, Gen. Ghulam Dastagir Mayar, told the New York Times. With allies …
The Gitmo Files
As if the Obama Administration’s inability to shutter Guantanamo Bay despite its pledge to do so weren’t bad enough, now it has to deal with a torrent of classified documents about the Cuban detainee prison and its 779 inmates.
Here’s what the 700 documents say, in a nutshell:
