National Security
Up-armored Jock Straps
White House to Pentagon: Cough Up More Money for Deficit Reduction
Just this week, Department of Defense (DoD) officials informed Congress that 95 weapons programs have increased in cost, to the tune of $64 billion. A primary driver of these cost increases: production cuts and the loss of economies of scale. Programs affected include the Marine Corps’ Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle, the Air Force’s …
Brits Bolster Benghazi Rebels–Slowly
UK Foreign Secretary William Hague announced today that the UK will double down on the rag-tag Libyan rebel leadership in Benghazi, expanding the team of British military officers there and contributing telecommunications equipment and protective body armor to the rebel effort to topple Muammar Gaddafi.
But the effort is still …
Troops’ Mental Health: Bills To Come
Here’s a sentence in a new report, The Psychological Costs of War: Military Combat and Mental Health, that should give any soldier, or soldier’s loved one, or taxpayer, pause:
Our preferred estimates suggest that combat-induced PTSD in the Global War on Terror imposes two-year costs of $1.5 to $2.7 billion on the U.S. health care system.
Surprise! Weapons’ Costs Continue to Rise
They’re called “SARs” inside the Pentagon, and they’re not referring to what the doctors called severe acute respiratory syndrome nearly a decade ago. Nope, these are the Pentagon’s quarterly reports on how well the military is doing at buying weapons. The latest SARs – it stands for Selected Acquisition Reports in the Pentagon – …
U.S. Still Darkening Libyan Skies
OK….as the stalemate grinds on in Libya, maybe we should discard the charade that the U.S. stopped playing an active role over Muammar Gaddafi’s nation since it handed off control of the operation to NATO a couple of weeks ago.
Here are a couple of numbers to keep in mind:
— U.S. warplanes are flying one out of every three …
A “Bodacious” Reef
Turning warships into reefs on the bottom of the ocean – when done so voluntarily – seems a strange fate for a destroyer like the USS Arthur W. Radford. Named in honor of the first Navy officer ever to serve as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, it will be the largest vessel ever sunk in the Atlantic – off the coast of …
Pentagon Journalism Review
Kind of sweet that just as Columbia University was announcing this year’s crop of Pulitzer Prize winners, the Pentagon inspector general was saying the Rolling Stone piece that led to the firing of Gen. Stanley McChrystal nearly a year ago didn’t pass muster with Defense Department editors. The IG concluded that there was …
Gadhafi’s brutal weapon of choice
This is a picture of the Soviet-made BM-21 Grad multiple rocket launching system. According to Human Rights Watch, forces loyal to Col. Moammar Gadhafi are using this thing to fire rockets into Misrata, including one recent attack that killed eight people waiting in line for bread.
It’s deadly. It can launch 40 122-millimeter rockets. …
Speaking of Government-Provided Health Care
Military retirees know that their family insurance payments under the so-called Tricare program — $460 a year, where they have been since 1995 — are going the way of the gramophone record. Given that hikes are inevitable, their leaders are telling them they should embrace the modest fee increases currently proposed — and then push for …
Four Strikes
Cory Provus, a Milwaukee Brewers baseball team broadcaster (since when did that become a position on the diamond?) recently visited troops recuperating at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in D.C.:
We met one young soldier from Staten Island, NY, that [hey — he’s a broadcaster] lost all 4 limbs while in Afghanistan. But there he was
…
Should the president fix Arlington cemetery?
A House Armed Services subcommittee last week ripped into the new management at Arlington National Cemetery for the continuing burial scandal there. The hearing followed one of my recent articles in TIME that showed how those new managers are sometimes relying on faulty burial paperwork — paperwork that caused the scandal in the first …