The good happened Thursday morning, as Defense Secretary Leon Panetta presided over the end of the U.S. military mission in Iraq, from a concrete courtyard at the Baghdad International Airport:
The cost was high — in blood and
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Leon Panetta
Is Leon Panetta the Right Man to be Secretary of Defense?
For several months, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta has been using extreme rhetoric to characterize cuts in the Pentagon budget beyond the $450 billion reduction over ten years he has already accepted. With the failure of the …
Super Committee Failure Hits Military Hard
Politicians can shrug off the congressional Super Committee’s failure to agree on meaningful deficit reduction. To them, it’s just another budget gimmick that didn’t pan out. But for the U.S. military, the Super Committee …
Panetta’s Dilemma: A Trillion Here, A Trillion There
When we first wrote about how the Pentagon could save $1 trillion over the coming decade way back in April, we felt more alone than an Air Force pilot in a drone hanger. Now everyone’s getting into the act. The most recent to weigh in: BusinessWeek magazine and the Financial Times newspaper. They write in the wake of the Super …
Sequestration. So Far…
The Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction’s failure to come up with a dime – never mind $1.2 trillion – in deficit reduction over the coming decade has set the stage for both tragedy – if you’re a defense secretary given to supersonic flights of rhetoric – and farce, if you’re an American taxpayer.
That failure …
War (un)Planning
You can always tell the rookie Pentagon reporter. He, or she, is the one who whispers: “They told me they’re planning for war with Iran!” That’s when the vets around the building have to say: “They’ve been doing that for decades. Somewhere along these 17 miles of corridors, they have plans for everything.”
At least until last …
Missile Defense: The Sky Continues To Fall…
Many mornings you can hear Boeing boasting over the Washington airwaves about how its ground-based missile system is protecting the United States. From what? There is no nation primed to attack the U.S. with I.C.B.M.s — or even close to it — in any military significant way. Yet we’re spending billions of dollars annually against …
U.S. Troops Heading Down Under
The U.S. is shipping 250 Marines to Australia by the middle of next year, a force that eventually will grow to 2,500. U.S. Air Force units will increasingly cycle in an out of bases in northern Australia – a full Marine Air-Ground Task Force. A MAGTF — pronounced mag-taff — is the Marines’ key unit for conducting missions across …
Ten Things to Know About the Coming Defense Cuts
If you haven’t been paying attention, this is where we stand on the Pentagon budget battle:
1. The Pentagon has already agreed to cut $450 billion over the coming decade from the roughly $7 trillion it had planned on getting. “These cuts are difficult and will require us to take some risks, but they are manageable,” Defense …
Is This Any Way To Deconstruct the Triad?
Defense Secretary Leon Panetta writes Congress that the “doomsday” cuts that will befall the Defense Department if sequestration occurs will force the military to eliminate one of the legs of its strategic nuclear triad – as if this is a bad thing.
The triad – that collection of land-based missiles, bombers and …
Fighting Words
Words matter when you are in charge of the world’s biggest military. So I listened closely in the Pentagon briefing room Thursday as Leon Panetta warned of looming disaster if the congressional super-committee fails to strike a grand bargain and the dreaded “sequestration” ax falls. That could double Pentagon cuts over the …
Thanks, Vets
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgwxhsInqB0]
Friday is Veterans Day, and, like clockwork, the Pentagon has rolled out a 75-second video of new Defense Secretary Leon Panetta – an Army vet himself — thanking all who have served. Do these celluloid Hallmarks mean anything? Most troops I speak with never see them; this one had …
A Toast…
Defense Secretary Leon Panetta is going to have some fine vino come New Year’s Eve. The $10,000 bottle is a payoff on an offer made by a California restaurateur. It seems Panetta, then CIA director, dined last New Year’s Eve at the tony Sardine Factory owned by pal Ted Balestreri in Panetta’s hometown of Monterey:
“I was talking
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