Over the weekend, the nation moved within seven months of End of the World Wednesday. That would be January 2, assuming Congress and the President can’t come up with $1.2 trillion in budget reductions over the next decade. Absent a deal, another $600 billion in defense cuts, would be piled atop the $487 billion already carved from the …
National Security
Breast-Feeding … in Uniform
Breast-feeding while in uniform has suddenly become a hot topic since two Washington Air National Guard moms were photographed in uniform while nursing their babies.
The photos were posted by the group Mom2Mom to promote World Breast-feeding Week coming in August. The group, founded by a military wife on Fairchild Air Force Base, was …
Drone Worrier
On the eve of the 1991 Gulf War – as hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops streamed toward Iraq-occupied Kuwait – a U.S. Army officer remarked how much easier all this would be if someone – a Saddam Hussein turncoat, …
Caring for the Caregiver
I am increasingly worried about the toll on my Army medical colleagues still left on active duty. The American public and the media legitimately focus on the enlisted Soldier and those who have borne the brunt of the direct fighting.
But we must also concern themselves with the welfare of the nurses, doctors, medics and other staff …
“I'm the first secretary of defense to visit Cam Ranh Bay since the war…And the fact that this ship is here in Cam Ranh Bay and that it is being serviced by contractors here at this location, and the repair work is being done by our Vietnamese friends, that is a tremendous indication of how far we have come in that relationship over these many years.”
U.S. Admits to Waging War Against Iran
Check out this New York Times story about President Obama speeding up waves of cyber attacks against Iran. I personally have no problem with this, and prefer it to Israel’s imagined missile strikes.
But just remember this …
“Enemy Dependency”
David Rothkopf, editor-at-large over at Foreign Policy magazine, sounds off on what he sees as America’s true vulnerability early in the 21st Century:
Since the end of the Cold War, America has been on a relentless search for enemies. I don’t mean a search in the sense of ferreting them out and defeating them. I mean that America
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Situation Normal: Afghanistan Fouled Up
A trifecta of trouble in three Pentagon inspector-general reports released Thursday concerning the U.S. military’s continuing struggle to build Afghan security forces so U.S. troops can come home.
Here is the first finding …
“About Face!”
“Funds for Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) are fully exempt from the sequester, so added costs for wartime operations would not be affected.”
— Letter from Defense Secretary Leon Panetta to Sen. John McCain last November
“Upon further review of the law and after consultation with the Office of Management and Budget, the
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“If they get nuclear weapons, we will get nuclear weapons.”
Navy Brains…and Heart
Sure, it gives one pause when the top graduate among the 1,099 midshipmen to be graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy this week isn’t — for the first time in the academy’s 158-year history — an American. Here, Defense Secretary …
Building a Secure Afghanistan
Much of the more than $600 billion the U.S. has spent over the past decade in Afghanistan has gone into developing its security forces – the Afghan army (ANA) and police (ANP). Major William Nordai, a member of the Army Corps of Engineers (USACE), returned from Afghanistan last June after spending a year in the northern part of the …
On Cyber Warfare, the American Public Is Constantly Being Played by the Pentagon
From a Washington Post piece describing “Plan X,” the Pentagon’s new push to develop cutting-edge offensive cyber weapons:
It makes sense “to take this on right now,” said Richard M. George, a former National Security Agency
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