Usually when Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, talks, it’s reported as “commenting” or “remarks.” But Wednesday he let the Pakistani military and its Inter-Services Intelligence unit know that their cozy relationship with the Haqqani terrorist network threatens relations between the two countries. The local …
Pentagon
Memo to the Military: Money’s Tight and Getting Tighter
Ashton Carter is the U.S.military’s chief weapons buyer. Judging from what he said yesterday at The Heritage Foundation about saving money in the defense budget, his job is about to get much more complicated if the Obama Administration gets its way by trying to reduce the federal budget deficit on the backs of those in …
Army Accessions Command, 2002-2011
The Army created its Accessions Command in 2002. On Wednesday, with encouragement from the Pentagon, it killed it. The U.S. Army Accessions Command was 9. The Army says it will shut down the command, based at Fort Monroe, Va., over the next 18 months. That will lead to the elimination of two general’s slots, 65 other military …
Don’t Take The Money And Run
Our country loves our troops so much we’ll do anything to give them more money — like extending, yet again — for the sixth time — the government’s deadline for them to apply for bonuses if they had to fight in Afghanistan or Iraq beyond their enlistment period. You may recall the controversial “stop loss” orders issued to troops …
Trapped in ‘Residual Nuclear Deterrence’
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUhiXQaJy9M]
Has anyone else been wondering why our vast nuclear forces are largely escaping unscathed from the budgetary axe falling on other defense programs? The justification, as put to me this week by a top Pentagon official, is that we still need to maintain ‘residual deterrence’ in …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
The Strange Case of the (Nearby) But Missing F-22s Over Libya
So the Air Force’s latest and greatest warplane – the $412 million per copy F-22 – has now been MIA in Iraq, Afghanistan and – most surprisingly – in imposing the no-fly zone over Libya. How come? Especially when it was already in the neighborhood on the eve of that conflict? It raises a whole new version of the so-called …
Advice To The Next Defense Secretary
As Defense Secretary Robert Gates heads toward the exit, there’s a blivet‘s worth of challenges facing his successor. Unlike Gates, the next secretary of defense won’t be following the unpopular Don Rumsfeld. Just as Jerry Ford benefited from not being Richard Nixon, Gates benefited from not being Rumsfeld. Despite such historical …
How to Save a Trillion
Speaking, as we just did, of military-spending reviews, Time has a compelling piece in its latest issue detailing just how the nation could save $1 trillion out of the $7 trillion it is planning to spend on military forces over the coming decade. The author asserts real cuts will not happen until the White House and Congress get the …