BattlelandVeterans
That’s the headline over this piece by a young woman working for the Department of Veterans Affairs here in D.C., where Lauren Bailey writes:
Part of my guilt is my own inaction at a watershed moment in our nation’s history. Everyone remembers where they were on September 11. It’s disappointing that I can vividly remember only a
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BattlelandPentagon
Folks in the Administration say they can’t target Muammar Gaddafi — per this earlier post — because the U.N. resolution doesn’t permit it. But that kind of makes you wonder why the Brit defence boss, Liam Fox, speaks so freely about Gaddafi being a Hellfire helipad. The U.S. has sometimes viewed UN resolutions as rubber bands, able …
BattlelandTroops
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. …
BattlelandWeapons
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 …
BattlelandWeapons
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 …
BattlelandWeapons
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 …
BattlelandPentagon
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 …
BattlelandNational Security
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) …
BattlelandNational Security
BattlelandWeapons
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 …
BattlelandNational Security
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.”
BattlelandNational Security
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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BattlelandNational Security
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 …
