It was a grim weekend in Afghanistan. A surprisingly sophisticated insurgent attack wiped out a half-dozen U.S. warplanes, …
Martin Dempsey
Lucky Shot
Army General Martin Dempsey’s C-17’s fuselage got pockmarked by shrapnel from some overnight shelling while it was parked outside on the tarmac at Afghanistan’s Bagram air base north of Kabul. A couple of airmen were …
“It is clear that sequestration would risk hollowing out our force and reducing its military options available to the nation. We would go from being unquestionably powerful everywhere, to being less visible globally, and presenting less of an overmatch to our adversaries. And that would translate into a different deterrent calculus and potentially therefore increase the likelihood of conflict.”
Peak Performance
Rhetorical Retreat
We’re cutting close to $500 billion out of the next decade’s defense spending. Then there’s another $500 billion to come if sequestration occurs next January because Congress can’t come up with $1.2 trillion in cuts or tax hikes, or some combo of both, over the coming decade.
That prospect of $1 trillion coming out of the …
Flipper Practices for Strait of Hormuz
Army General Martin Dempsey (right), chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, watches a bottlenose dolphin in San Diego on Monday. He was touring the Navy’s Marine Mammal Program with sailors from Explosive Ordnance Disposal Mobile …
Testifying Before Congress: Laughing Through the Pain
Testifying before Congress repeatedly on the defense budget is tough work. “I’ve been in hearings for the last three days — shit, I think I should get some kind of award going through that crap,” Defense Secretary Leon Panetta told airmen in Louisiana on Friday. “I mean, I told General [Marty] Dempsey [chairman of the Joint Chiefs, …
“Cross-Domain Synergy -- the complementary vice merely additive employment of capabilities in different domains such that each enhances the effectiveness and compensates for the vulnerabilities of the others -- to establish superiority in some combination of domains that will provide the freedom of action required by the mission.”
New Defense Strategy: The Information Vacuum
On Thursday, President Obama and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta released what they called their Defense Strategic Guidance – think of it as the guardrails that guide the U.S. military down the interstate highway of war. …
The Changing of the Guard
I would never want to belong to any club that would have someone like me for a member.
The sentiment is usually attributed to Groucho Marx, but as of this week it works for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, too.
“My biggest worry is they will miscalculate our resolve…Any miscalculation could mean that we are drawn into conflict, and that would be a tragedy for the region and the world.”
Iraq: Assessing Worth
“We’ve paid a great price here,” Army General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, said as the U.S. wrapped up its mission in Iraq on Thursday. “And it has been a price worth paying.”
This led to a piquant …
U.S. Military in Decline, or Just a “Historic Cycle of Resources”?
It’s not a good thing when the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff visits Europe and it leads to a story like this from his own press shop:
It’s not his emphatic answer that counts, of course; it’s the fact that he felt obligated to state, in response to a question, that the U.S. military is not in decline — and then say …