If you haven’t been paying attention, this is where we stand on the Pentagon budget battle:
1. The Pentagon has already agreed to cut $450 billion over the coming decade from the roughly $7 trillion it had planned on getting. “These cuts are difficult and will require us to take some risks, but they are manageable,” Defense …
It seems the toilets aboard the aircraft carrier have been balky, and too often MIA, over the first six months of its maiden voyage. Reports the Virginian-Pilot:
“It definitely affects my morale,” said [Petty Officer 1st Class Richard] Frakes, an aviation mechanic. “When I was unable to relieve myself for two days, I was irate to
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Defense Secretary Leon Panetta writes Congress that the “doomsday” cuts that will befall the Defense Department if sequestration occurs will force the military to eliminate one of the legs of its strategic nuclear triad – as if this is a bad thing.
The triad – that collection of land-based missiles, bombers and …
That’s the headline on the front page of Tuesday’s Washington Post, over a story by Greg Jaffe. He traces much of what we reported in this week’s cover story, An Army Apart. But he drills down into the mindset of troops, who have concluded the gap we reported on has curdled into pity among Americans for the troops fighting the …
Michael O’Hanlon is one of those perpetually peripatetic Pentagon punditeers. When he’s not busy commenting from his perch at the Brookings Institution, the former Congressional Budget Office military expert is at Time appearing on Command Post (as he is Tuesday), penning an op-ed for the New York Times (as he did Monday), or …
Thousands of U.S. troops are now heading home from Iraq every week. By New Year’s Eve, the 45,000 who were there on Oct. 21 when President Obama announced their final pullout, will be down to zero. So what does Iraq’s near-term future look like once all the U.S. troops have come home? The Obama Administration has said it had no …
A couple of Time colleagues – International editor Jim Frederick, author of the acclaimed Black Hearts, and Nate Rawlings, an up-and-comer at the magazine and an Army vet of the Iraq war – wore our fingertips to the bone on Veterans Day. It was my first chance to try to chat using Twitter; limited to 140 characters per …
So who made up the loss in your retirement savings – assuming you have such an account – when the market tanked? Tanked is the right word here, because the answer is no one made you whole – unless you worked for a tank-maker or other defense contractors.
Gretchen Morgenson at the New York Times pulls back the curtain on how …
As we noted in June, the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps now appear on the verge of buying all 74 of Britain’s aging AV-8 Harrier jump jets. Navy Times is reporting that a U.S. rear admiral has confirmed the deal.
How the mighty have fallen. It’s quite a comedown for the U.S. military to procure aircraft from something called the …
The nation honors its heroes by naming gray-hulled Navy ships after them. They sail the globe bearing such names on behalf of a grateful country. That’s why the christening of the fleet’s USNS Medgar Evers over the weekend by his widow seems appropriate. Sure, it happened because Navy Secretary Ray Mabus is a former …
Words matter when you are in charge of the world’s biggest military. So I listened closely in the Pentagon briefing room Thursday as Leon Panetta warned of looming disaster if the congressional super-committee fails to strike a grand bargain and the dreaded “sequestration” ax falls. That could double Pentagon cuts over the …
Happy Veterans Day!
Where the heck do those 22 million U.S. military veterans come from? Well, Ray Moran has done more than his share to bring them in. The retired Army sergeant major has spent decades recruiting soldiers. Having just turned 82, he has earned his nickname Old Soldier en route to getting more than 1,000 young men …
