Leon Panetta

Panetta Tells Super Committee to “Do the Right Thing”

Testifying before the House Armed Services Committee today, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta directly challenged the Congressional “Super Committee” to “do the right thing.” In Panetta’s view, the “right thing” is to solve the debt crisis by going after the drivers of America’s bulging debt. That would be the Big 3 …

Pork Ranger

As the defense-budget battles heat up – they’ll come to a boil later this week when Defense Secretary Leon Panetta heads to Capitol Hill to say where he thinks the ax should fall – you’ve got to be on the lookout for pyromaniacs in fields of straw men (credit: William F. Buckley via George Will). While a comprehensive review of …

Aussies Begin to Question U.S. Alliance

TOKYO – It was all smiles and bonhomie at the US-Australia defense meetings in San Francisco this month. But Down Under, there are growing calls for Australia to scale back its reliance on America in favor of – you guessed it – China.

“Australia can no longer assume that we can continue to exist in a world where we can …

Growing Afghanistan Doubts

Concern inside the U.S. military that Afghanistan is not going to end well is heating up. It’s always been simmering, but now seems to be coming to a slow boil. Lately, at least in private conversations with officers up and down the chain, the concerns are becoming louder.

“There is no endgame and there hasn’t been one from …

Alleged War Savings and OMB Head-Butting



You know that the tussles over Pentagon spending were going to get interesting once Battleland‘s own Gordon Adams — who ran the Office of Management and Budget’s national-security shoppe when now-Defense Secretary Leon Panetta ran OMB — started arguing math with his former boss. Gordon declaredMonday that the Obama …

The Pentagon’s Foreign-Language Frustrations

As Defense Secretary Leon Panetta told 2,500 troops Tuesday about the foreign-language skills he championed as a congressman, an active-duty Army officer was complaining about the paucity of military personnel who can speak anything other than English.

The current push to train soldiers to speak the local languages in Afghanistan …

Pentagon Reportedly Planning for “Doomsday” Spending Scenario

Is the White House assuming massive defense cuts next year–much bigger than the cuts already made? Even bigger than the additional reductions contained in the recently passed debt-ceiling legislation?

It sure seems so.

Rumor has it that the Administration’s accounting arm, the Office of Management and Budget, has issued fresh …

$1 Trillion in Cuts Looming

It hardly seemed possible when we first broached the possibility in April that defense spending could be cut by $1 trillion over the coming decade. But there it was Wednesday in the latest issue of National Journal, one of those heavy-duty – and costly – magazines read by all of Washington’s policy wonks:

The Pentagon is

“Gaddafi’s Days Are Numbered”

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta told us something we’d been waiting to hear Tuesday: “Gaddafi’s days are numbered,” he said of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi during a session with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at National Defense University.

But then we started flipping through the pages of our notebook, backwards through time …

Cyber War Worrywarts

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta whipped up the cyber-threat Friday during his get-acquainted visit to Nebraska’s Offutt Air Force Base, home of the U.S. Strategic Command. “We could face a cyber attack that could be the equivalent of Pearl Harbor,” he said. Such an attack, Panetta warned, could “take down our power grid system, take …

The Pentagon Budget Battle’s Ratcheting Rhetoric

Glad to see the debt crisis has been resolved in the past two weeks while I was away. It has been plain to anyone paying attention for the past couple of years that military spending – or “security” spending as the Orwellians in the White House are now calling it – has to come down, and by more than the $400 billion President …

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