BattlelandPentagon
Bizzaro is that D.C. Comics character whose every statement means the opposite. Got a two-fer on that score from the Pentagon on Wednesday. Inquiring reporters wanted to know if the planned basing of 2,500 Marines in Australia had anything at all to do with China. “It’s not about China,” Pentagon spokesman George Little …
BattlelandNational Security
Rick Maze over at Military Times has a piece this morning about Senator Patty Murray’s ongoing discussion with the VA over benefits. The entire article is worth a read, but one detail is worth pulling out: according to Maze, the VA now has “868,000 pending claims, 61% of which are more than 125 days old.”
These numbers are huge, but …
BattlelandWeapons
This just in from the Pentagon, hypersonically, of course:
Department of Defense Announces Sucessful Test of Army Advanced Hypersonic Weapon Concept
Today the U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command/Army Forces Strategic Command conducted the first test flight of the Advanced Hypersonic Weapon (AHW) concept. At 6:30 a.m. EST
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BattlelandPentagon
There are many different ways of measuring how much the nation spends on its military. Folks who think we spend enough, and think cuts can be safely made, talk about how it has nearby doubled since 9/11 and remains above the Cold War average. But those opposed to cuts prefer different yardsticks. They point out how an ever-shrinking …
BattlelandVeterans
Military leaders have been telling us for years that troops need to spend more time at home between combat deployments – dwell time, as it’s known – to help keep the detritus of war: depression, suicides, divorce, post-traumatic stress disorder and other mental ailments, at bay:
When deployed for 12 months, we must get them to
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BattlelandVeterans
It was only a couple of months ago we noted that the Senate had urged the military services to pare back their geysers of competing programs fighting with one another to fight the plague of post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injuries afflicting U.S. troops. “They’ve launched dozens of programs with multiple …
BattlelandWeapons
Ever yawn while at the wheel, maybe slumber a little bit at a stop sign – and tap the car in front of you? I’m sure it has happened to a lot of us. Just be thankful you weren’t at the controls of an F-16 when it happened. Back in July, one U.S. F-16 ran into the other at South Korea’s Kusan air base. Thankfully, both were on …
BattlelandVeterans
The military has long known that many troops won’t take advantage of the roster of mental-health care options the military offers. That’s because they fear the stigma it might generate could hurt their career prospects. Does that aversion contribute to the military’s increased suicide rate? Dr. Margaret Harrell, a Center for a …
BattlelandTroops
The Pentagon just announced three contracts (above, click on it to enlarge) totaling up to $7 billion for Meals-Ready-to-Eat for troops – and victims of humanitarian disasters – to eat through 2016. Sure, MREs are getting tastier, but $7 billion? We just called the folks who bought them – Philadelphia’s Defense Logistics Agency …
BattlelandPresident Obama
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 …
BattlelandNational Security
Eliot Cohen is one of those Washington, D.C., polymaths who, when he’s not professing at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, is putting together the Gulf War Air Power Survey or the already-classic Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen, and Leadership in Wartime. In his spare time, he writes books that are …
BattlelandPentagon
It’s hard for most Americans to realize, as we noted in our cover story this week, that there is a major war involving U.S. troops underway in Afghanistan. It’s a splotchy kind of war, with no well-defined front. That makes it a difficult war to cover. Sometimes we have to rely on the folks wearing military uniforms to give us a …
BattlelandWeapons
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 …
