Battleland

CBO Defense Option #2

Another Congressional Budget Office way to trim defense spending is to slow the rate of growth in troops’ pay. That’s going to be a tough sell, especially during wartime. For a decade, Congress has boosted the Pentagon’s annual recommendation that military pay raises match the employment cost index by adding 0.5% to each year’s ECI. …

Libya: Targeting Charades

Charade is a French word, meaning entertainment. So is Target, at least when my wife shops there (“TAR-jay!”). But why are we engaging in such a charade when it comes to targeting Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi?

“If the regime continues to wage war on its people, those who are involved in those command-and-control assets need to …

Time Sails On…

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 …

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

Before we give the Congressional Budget Office a machete to go after defense spending, it thoughtfully provides us with a roadmap that shows where the money goes.

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.”

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