BattlelandMilitary Spending
Marine General John Allen, commander of forces in Afghanistan, is planning for the end – the withdrawal of U.S. forces, expecting to leave behind a small training force, but saddling the U.S. taxpayers with at least $2 billion a year to pay for the Afghan security force. Better deal than we have now, at roughly $100 billion a year, …
BattlelandPiracy
BattlelandClose-up
TIME’s photo editors bring you the best pictures from the front lines and home.
BattlelandMilitary Personnel
The Army removed Colonel Dallas Homas, commander of Madigan Army Medical Center in Washington state, on Tuesday from his post because of an investigation into whether post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) diagnoses were reversed …
BattlelandMilitary
TIME’s photo editors bring you the best pictures from the front lines and home.
BattlelandChina
Nice piece in the New York Times on Tuesday, previewing Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta’s much-anticipated announcement of almost a half-trillion in defense cuts over the next decade.As Mark Thompson just noted, not a whole lot …
BattlelandNational Security
It’s interesting to think back to the start of the global economic crisis, when there were a lot of assumptions voiced about how a rising quotient of international tension would inevitably morph into more conflicts and thus more traditionally focused defense spending – i.e., great powers hedging against one another versus, say, …
BattlelandCyber
My man Mark Thompson puts up a cheeky post yesterday that I most heartily approved of. In it he speaks of cyberwar worrywarts and rightly fears that, as the terror war recedes in some priority, new little piggies approach the DoD trough. And as these cyberwar advocates find such a prime target in China, I would note that their …
BattlelandNational Security
Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Adm. Mullen can hardly be expected to step up to the mike and say they can live with $800-900 billion fewer dollars than the Department currently projects it would like to have for defense.
The didn’t disappoint yesterday. They can live with the roughly $400 billion …
BattlelandChina
Mark Thompson picks up on Chins’s cheeky advice to visiting Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Admiral Mike Mullen regarding our coupling of world-class defense spending with our world-class national debt/faltering economy. We can brush it aside, of course, seeing that it’s coming from our #1 excuse for defense spending (Mustn’t let those …
BattlelandWeapons
Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld emerged from the woodwork last week to warn Leon Panetta not to do the wrong thing. He should know; his stewardship of DOD was an almost unmitigated laundry list (should we say “snowflakes”?) of wrong things.
But I wouldn’t recommend Panetta take his advice. Rumsfeld has no idea of how to …
BattlelandWeapons
Financial Times story last week (US urged to rethink export controls on drones) re: Paris Air Show cites multiple US defense corporate sources complaining that unless the US Government lifts some of the restrictions, the world’s “insatiable appetite” for drones will be exploited by other nations’ military-industrial complexes. The …
BattlelandNuclear Weapons
As the Pentagon’s “efficiencies review” unfolds, one Cold War mainstay of the US military posture is inevitably going to be retired – namely, the land-based portion of the strategic missile triad. The Pentagon is tasked with coming up with $400 billion in savings over the next decade, and so this long-discussed option (and old Mark …
