If either of those scenarios takes place, press secretary George Little said, “we would be looking at, in all likelihood, the smallest Army and Marine Corps in decades, the smallest tactical Air Force since [the branch] was established and the smallest Navy in nearly 100 years.”

George Little

Automatic cuts to the Defense Department would take place, through the 2011 Budget Control Act’s sequestration mechanism, if the Committee members don’t offer a plan to reduce the deficit by Nov. 24. The cuts would also take place if the whole of Congress fails to adopt a plan by the Committee in December.

For the Defense Department, that means another $500 billion from defense spending over 10 years, on top of $350 billion in cuts already identified over the same period.

The department has been looking at hundreds of millions of dollars in budget cuts and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has been adamant, Little said, that moving to sequestration would be a “devastating” scenario for the nation’s security.

The secretary “has reiterated time and time again that we don’t have to choose between our fiscal security and our national security,” Little said, “but if we go to sequestration, we would very well have to make that choice.

Little said that $1 trillion in cuts would make it necessary for the Pentagon to break faith in some areas — including jobs and salary benefits — with those in uniform who are serving the nation.

“In a time of war,” he said, “that’s unacceptable.”

At the Pentagon, internal analysis shows that sequestration also would have a profound impact on the U.S. industrial base, he added, by threatening many of the 3.8 million military and civilian jobs that the sector represents.

“We’re not talking about just military jobs, we’re also talking about jobs in the private sector that support the innovation and creativity and capabilities that we need to keep America strong,” he said.

Moving to sequestration and the additional budget cuts it would require, department officials believe “would potentially add 1 percent to the national unemployment rate,” Little said.

Panetta, he added, has made Congress aware of the consequences of such deep defense cuts.

“We want to make it very clear [to everyone] that sequestration is a red line that this government should not cross,” Little said.

Several grisly photos (warning: graphic pictures of dead bodies) of the aftermath of the early-morning raid have already surfaced. The Reuters news agency obtained them from a member of Pakistan’s security forces who entered bin Laden’s compound after a team of Navy SEALs shot and killed bin Laden. None of the photographs, however, show bin Laden, and President Obama has said his administration will not release any such pictures out of concern that they would incite additional violence or be used for anti-American propaganda.

The AP, however, maintains that such a judgment call runs counter to its ability to determine whether the photographs are newsworthy. Michael Oreskes, senior managing editor of the AP, told The Atlantic’s John Hudson, “In the week since the raid there’s been a whole series of story-lines about what happened in this raid. At this point, anything that might shed more light on what occurred is potentially quite newsworthy. So we would like this imagery to fully understand what happened during this event.”

In the text of its FOIA request, the AP wrote hopefully to the administration, reminding it of the promises that had been during the Obama campaign:

“The Obama White House ‘pledged to be the most transparent government in U.S. history,” wrote the AP,  “and to comply much more closely with the Freedom of Information Act than the Bush administration did.’”

The AP joins Politico, Fox News, Judicial Watch and Citizens United (the controversial right-wing nonprofit group at the center of a notorious and contested Supreme Court decision) in filing FOIA requests for the pictures. So far, Politico is the only organization to report that it’s received an acknowledgment of its request, which has been forwarded to U.S. Army Intelligence.

If in fact that means that the Army has possession of the photos, it might make the FOIA requests a bit harder for the government to fight. Were the photos classified as presidential records, they couldn’t be released until at least after Obama leaves office, but if, as appears to be the case, the Army has them, it’s slightly more difficult to block their release to news agencies like the AP, Politico and Fox News.

Still, even though the Army is subject to immediate FOIA requests, petitions to see the pictures from the media and the public could be shot down for any number of reasons. In a post on the blog for George Washington University’s National Security Archive, the organization’s Nate Jones laid out several ways that the government could make the photos exempt from FOIA requests, thus blocking their release.

Writing last week, before the crop of FOIA requests was known, Jones explained that the government could use any of several exemption statutes pertaining to national security to block the photos’ release, or it could even cite privacy laws protecting the bin Laden family, an action for which there is actually precedent (PDF).

If all else fails, Jones says, President Obama can lean on Congress to quickly pass a law granting a statutory exemption to the photos — meaning there would be a case-specific injunction against release. That may seem at first blush like a last-ditch effort, but there are in fact 240 such exemptions currently on the books, including one against the release of any more pictures of detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib than have already been made public.

Of course, any organization faced with a FOIA exemption can appeal the decision, but it’s a drawn-out process unlikely in such a high-profile case to bear any fruit. Barring any major surprises (or leaks), the photographs of bin Laden’s death seem unlikely to ever see the light of day.

Tommy Sowers is vying for a seat in a conservative district in Missouri. (Tommy Sowers for Congress)

Born and raised in Missouri’s conservative, rural eighth district, Tommy Sowers served in the Army as a Ranger and a Green Beret, and then as a professor at West Point. Now the unorthodox Democrat — a critic of the bank bailouts and President Obama’s troop surge in Afghanistan — is running for Congress against a Republican incumbent.

[Congress1] This year looks likely to be the worst year for the Democratic Party since 1994, at least. But Sowers remains undeterred. Since he started running, he has shaken enough hands and raised enough money to get noticed by the brass in Washington. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) named him to their exclusive “Red to Blue” program, making him just one of 29 upstarts the party figured might have a shot at turning a red district blue this year.

Besides conferring a degree of legitimacy, however, the program is mainly symbolic. With limited resources to spend and seemingly more and more Democratic seats once considered safe now becoming competitive, the DCCC has decided to mainly play defense, indicating it will spend nearly all its money to shore up embattled incumbents this cycle. But the consensus on that logic is far from clear: If you’re convinced Democrats are doomed, it makes sense to put your money on the natural advantages — name recognition, institutional support, sheer inertia — that incumbents enjoy. But if you believe that the anti-Washington pitch is so great that it’s incumbents, not Dems, who are truly in trouble, then backing credible challengers like Sowers might not be so bad a bet.

So far, however, Sowers is anything but a sure thing. A recent poll — taken by a GOP polling agency in early September – shows him trailing his opponent, Rep. Jo Ann Emerson (R-Mo.) by more than thirty points. But it’s better than his numbers from April, in which he barely registered in voters’ consciousness, and it’s enough, apparently, to make Emerson sound a worried appeal last month for more cash, cautioning supporters in D.C., “I have seen candidates who celebrated in September and wept in November.”

So what’s a lonely Dem fighting an uphill battle in Missouri to do? Sowers spoke with TWI the other week when he swung though D.C., and the interview is lightly edited for clarity and length:

TWI: Democrats have been putting what limited resources they have into defending incumbents because that’s the conventional wisdom. How do you respond to that logic and what makes you think your campaign might be any different?

Sowers: Two millennia of warfare teaches you that you get your ass kicked on defense. You only win on offense. It’s a principle of war. And so I recognize and understand why incumbents get first crack on this but this is an anti-incumbent year, it truly is. Our plan all along was to win the race and do it on our own. I didn’t want to be one of those candidates, and I’ve met plenty, that say, “Oh, if only the state or national or some outside group had come in or gotten involved, we’d have won the race.” For us we’re focused entirely on the climate and the resources need to fight and win in the eighth district.

TWI: Running in a conservative state in a conservative district, you’ve taken some, well, conservative positions, most notably your opposition to [the Troubled Asset Relief Program]. Does it feel strange to be advocating a position that I more often hear coming from tea party candidates?

Sowers: I’m seeking to represent the eighth congressional district and they don’t see the fairness in a bailout where they don’t feel they had a cause in it, so it’s a position that both reflects the values of the district and also something that I believe.

TWI: So you personally believe the country would have been better off without TARP?

Sowers: Well, I think it’s much more than TARP. It’s the twelve pieces of legislation that led up to it. We’re talking about the repeal of Glass-Steagall and the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, so basically that process of creating a system that leads to a bailout is one thing that I’m going to fix.

TWI: In attacking your competitor for supporting the bailout, your race mirrors the heated Senate battle in your state between Secretary of State Robin Carnahan (D-Mo.) and Rep. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.). Is that a fair comparison?

Sowers: We’ve got a different race and a different opponent. What I’ve really seen out there is an anti-incumbent and really anti-establishment mood, and you don’t get more “D.C. establishment” than Jo Ann Emerson. She’s the daughter of the RNC chairman, she’s lived [in D.C.] almost her entire life, and she’s one of the five former lobbyists — there’s lots of future lobbyists in Congress — but she’s one of the five former ones. And what we see in this campaign is just the arrogance of establishment. She spent over $6,000 of her campaign election funds at Tiffany’s jewelry store over the last few years while purporting to represent the eighth-poorest district in America.

She’s also spent money at Neiman Marcus and W Hotels and Ritz Carltons and expensive tie shops in Italy. This was not a one-off event that she can blame on some staffer. What you can blame this on is the arrogance of being an established power, but this is a year where being as established power is more of a liability than an asset.

TWI: You also voted for Missouri’s Proposition C, which attempts to invalidate the personal mandate to purchase health insurance, a central component of Obama’s health insurance reform bill.

Sowers: I was one of the few rural Democrats out there to come out and support health insurance reform, but that doesn’t mean I’m for every provision of it. Proposition C was tightly constructed and it dealt with the individual mandate — and when you look out across the party, there’s a lot of folks out there that don’t believe in the mandate.

TWI: But it’s not as if you can take one piece out of health care reform and expect it to work as well. Without a mandate, you can’t reasonably demand that health insurance companies stop denying coverage for people with preexisting conditions. So how would you take this one piece out without letting the whole structure crumble?

Sowers: I don’t think [the personal mandate] should have been in there in the first place. You’re talking about the federal government mandating the purchase of a private product. The parts of health reform that I do like are the parts about creating competition. That’s one of the ways that you drive down costs, by setting up state-based exchanges. I think its one of your most effective ways to do that. And the credits to small businesses – I’m from a district with a lot of companies with less than fifty employees and there’s a lot of businesses that are going to benefit from those.

TWI: But is the Prop C measure even constitutional? Do you believe it can it nullify a portion of federal law?

Sowers: I’m not a legal scholar on this, but when it comes to the federal government mandating the purchase of a private product, this is something that doesn’t sit well in the eigth congressional district and lots of parts of America. So I think it’s going to be debated in the courts but ultimately it needs to be fixed in Congress.

TWI: The subject you tend to talk about most, however, is Afghanistan. It doesn’t seem to be the main issue that the electorate, at least nationally, is citing in the current cycle so I’m wondering why you’re bringing it up so much and what your position is.

Sowers: I’m not bringing up the issue. The people I’m seeking to represent are. I did 28 town halls over 28 straight days in July and I got asked about Afghanistan in every single town hall, and there’s a reason behind it. Even though you’re only talking about one percent of the population – or really less than that – that’s currently serving, it’s a much higher percentage in my district. There’s 70,000 veterans in my district and when I enter a room and I ask people how many of you are veterans or related to people who are serving, almost the entire room raises their hand. So this is an issue that has personal salience for the people in my home because it matters. It’s personal.

But more than that, it is tied to issues in 2010. Folks at home, they ask me all the time, “Why are we spending money overseas when we should be spending it here or we shouldn’t be adding more to the debt?” When we talk about where can we cut in terms of discretionary spending, right now we’re spending $400 a gallon – the taxpayer is – for every gallon of gas in Kabul, so it’s an area where there can actually be cost savings. And any soldier that is deployed – they’ve seen the waste, fraud, and abuse that occurs on military operations. So the stance on Afghanistan is very simply, we need to end fighting a conventional war because we’re fighting an unconventional conflict. […]

TWI: If Obama wanted to come and campaign for you in Missouri, what would be your reaction to that?

Sowers: There’s been no offer, and for me, we’re really running a campaign that’s focused on local issues. People in my district aren’t getting swept up in this whole national debate. They just want somebody that can come in and fix it. People say it’s a bad year, or potentially a bad year, for Democrats. Well it’s a bad year for a lot of people out there and it’s because of the economy. It’s because our jobs have been shipped overseas and it’s because we’ve bailed out places like Wall Street, and they understand that causal link. So they’re looking far more for a guy that’s actually from there, working his tail off in a campaign, who will work his tail off in Congress.

TWI: The only poll I’ve seen recently is something from Missouri State University that had you down 64 to 17 percent. Is that the latest?

Sowers: No we’ve got updated numbers and it’s looking good. We’re closing the gap – our name ID, which is what we’re tracking very closely, is much higher than we expected it to be. So this is a race that will ultimately break later, and we know that, but right now we’re reaping the benefits of, just frankly, working our tail off. We have a great field program in place, I’m out on the ground quite a bit, and now voters are meeting me for the second and third time, so I like where we’re at.

TWI: You did something where you ran through part or all of the district earlier this year?

Sowers: I marched 100 miles over Memorial Day weekend through 100 miles of yard sales, and when you walk up to a voter and say, “I just walked 80 miles to meet you,” which was a true statement, they’ve never seen anything like that before. I’m not trying to run this campaign, frankly, as an old guy. I’m running it as I am, which is as a 34-year-old, tobacco-using Green Beret straight out of the military who’s not the most finely polished stone out there, but who is sincere in his desire to fight for his home.

Army investigators at Arlington National Cemetery have found more than 100 unmarked graves, scores of grave sites with headstones that are not recorded on cemetery maps, and at least four burial urns that had been unearthed and dumped in an area where excess grave dirt is kept.

From Army Secretary John McHugh’s press conference announcing disciplinary action for Arlington officials and redress for the dysfunction:

I’m unable to explain the past, but I can promise this about the future.  The United States Army will take every step necessary to fully ensure that every challenge, every need at Arlington is clearly understood and effectively addressed.  We will initiate those steps necessary to best correct yesterday’s oversight and meet tomorrow’s requirement.  We owe no less to our departed heroes, no less to the loved ones of this nation who, when the call was sounded, stepped forward to serve, answered with love and dedication.  For them, for their loved ones and for this nation, the better tomorrows for Arlington National Cemetery begin today.

U.S. success internationally is found “by steering those currents in the direction of liberty and justice, so nations thrive by meeting their responsibilities and face consequences when they don’t,” Obama told the cadets, newly commissioned second lieutenants in the U.S. Army. The measure of success is found in that cooperation’s ability to “lessen conflicts around the world.” And in guiding the international order toward it, the approach the U.S. has to take on its own must involve a more equitable distribution of its military and civilian power.

Next week, Obama will release his National Security Strategy, fleshing out the themes here in greater detail and connecting them to the course his foreign policy is already on. Already, much of them have been on display in the Quadrennial Defense Review, Obama’s Oslo speech accepting the Nobel Peace Prize and a recent speech by Jim Jones, his national security adviser.

Some relevant excerpts from the West Point commencement address:

American innovation must be the foundation of American power — because at no time in human history has a nation of diminished economic vitality maintained its military and political primacy. And so that means that the civilians among us, as parents and community leaders, elected officials, business leaders, we have a role to play. We cannot leave it to those in uniform to defend this country — we have to make sure that America is building on its strengths.

As we build these economic sources of our strength, the second thing we must do is build and integrate the capabilities that can advance our interests, and the common interests of human beings around the world. America’s armed forces are adapting to changing times, but your efforts have to be complemented. We will need the renewed engagement of our diplomats, from grand capitals to dangerous outposts. We need development experts who can support Afghan agriculture and help Africans build the capacity to feed themselves. We need intelligence agencies that work seamlessly with their counterparts to unravel plots that run from the mountains of Pakistan to the streets of our cities. We need law enforcement that can strengthen judicial systems abroad, and protect us here at home. And we need first responders who can act swiftly in the event of earthquakes and storms and disease.

The burdens of this century cannot fall on our soldiers alone. It also cannot fall on American shoulders alone. Our adversaries would like to see America sap its strength by overextending our power. And in the past, we’ve always had the foresight to avoid acting alone. We were part of the most powerful wartime coalition in human history through World War II. We stitched together a community of free nations and institutions to endure and ultimately prevail during a Cold War.

Yes, we are clear-eyed about the shortfalls of our international system. But America has not succeeded by stepping out of the currents of cooperation — we have succeeded by steering those currents in the direction of liberty and justice, so nations thrive by meeting their responsibilities and face consequences when they don’t.

There’s also this assertive declaration that American power and American leadership are hardly in decline. Charles Krauthammer of The Washington Post has spent Obama’s presidency hysterically and unconvincingly trying to argue that Obama is a “declinist” in practice, so expect a forthcoming Krauthammer column to explain this away:

We believe, “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” And that truth has bound us together, a nation populated by people from around the globe, enduring hardship and achieving greatness as one people. And that belief is as true today as it was 200 years ago. It is a belief that has been claimed by people of every race and religion in every region of the world. Can anybody doubt that this belief will be any less true — any less powerful — two years, two decades, or even two centuries from now?

That’s the Human Terrain System, a hybrid anthropology and intelligence program. Danger Room pretty much owns the story for chronicling its exploits, its successes and its failures, so I’ll refer you to this post today about HTS’s role in Afghanistan. But the House Armed Services Committee isn’t convinced that HTS adds value to the war effort. Its summary of the bill includes this shot across the program’s bow:

While the Committee remains supportive of the Army’s Human Terrain System (HTS) to leverage social science expertise to support operational commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is increasingly concerned that the Army has not paid sufficient attention to addressing certain concerns. The Committee encourages the Department to continue to develop a broad range of opportunities that leverage the important contributions that can be offered by social science expertise to support key missions such as irregular warfare, counterinsurgency, and stability and reconstruction operations. The bill limits the obligation of funding for HTS until the Army submits a required assessment of the program, provides revalidation of all existing operations requirements, and certifies Department?level guidelines for the use of social scientists.

A spokesman for the part of the Army housing HTS declined to comment on “ongoing budget negotiations in Congress.” But my understanding is this is a matter of the Defense Department not delivering a report it needs to give the committee explaining the value of the program. If that report is forthcoming, as I understand it is, then the program shouldn’t experience any interruption in funding.

Meanwhile, Andrew Exum of the Center for a New American Security finds at least one valuable proposal in the defense bill.

(1)   Expand the pilot program to fully deploy eGuardian as the DoD-wide force protection threat reporting system to handle suspicious incident activities. The eGuardian system, which is FBI-owned and maintained, will safeguard civil liberties, while enabling information sharing among Federal, State, local, and tribal law enforcement partners, including interagency fusion centers.

(2) Complete the deployment of the Law Enforcement Defense Data Exchange system (D-DEx) allowing all DoD law enforcement agencies to share criminal investigation as well as other law enforcement data as appropriate. D-DEx will be a consolidated database to enable organizations across the Department to query, retrieve, and post criminal investigation and law enforcement data in a single repository.

(3) Establish the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Homeland Defense and Americas’ Security Affairs as the DoD lead for the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force program.

(4) Strengthen DoD’s antiterrorism training program by incorporating lessons learned from the Fort Hood incident, Department of Homeland Security best practices on workplace violence, and civilian law enforcement active shooter awareness training.

This won’t satisfy the likes of Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), who wanted Muslim soldiers singled out as extremist risk threats. “I believe in racial and ethnic profiling,” Inhofe confessed during a January hearing about the Fort Hood investigation.

U.S. soldiers train Afghan police in Herat. (EPA/ZUMApress.com)

An obscure Army contracting office with ties to the private security firm Blackwater has formally lost control of a lucrative contract to train Afghan police, the Pentagon and U.S. military officials in Afghanistan confirmed to TWI.

[Security1] The office, known as the Counter-Narcoterrorism Technology Program Office or CNTPO, came under criticism from the Government Accountability Office earlier this month for having only a marginal relationship to the training of Afghan police. CNTPO has responsibility for the military’s counternarcotics efforts, not the training of foreign military forces, and only received control over the contract after the U.S. military last year moved to take it away from the State Department and sought to rapidly award the contract to one of the five companies with which it does business — one of which is Blackwater.

That bureaucratic shift prompted a protest from State’s contractor, DynCorp, which stood to lose millions from the switch and argued that a counternarcotics office was an improper choice to award a contract for police training services. On March 15, the Government Accountability Office agreed, formally saying that the military’s solicitations were “outside the scope of [CNTPO's] existing contracts” according to a top GAO procurement official, Ralph O. White. But GAO also did not formally say that CNTPO had to be stripped of its contract authority, creating confusion over the future of the contract.

According to several officials, the U.S./NATO military command in Afghanistan responsible for training Afghan security forces, known as NTM-A or CSTC-A, have decided keeping CNTPO involved would invite the same complaints that prompted GAO to scotch a contract worth up to $1 billion. “NTM-A/CSTC-A has seen the GAO ruling, is reviewing it and evaluating how to proceed in a manner that most effectively meets legal requirements and advances the key goal of helping to train an effective Afghan National Police Force,” said Lt. Col. Mark Wright, a Pentagon spokesman.

Reached in Kabul for comment, Lt. Col. David Hylton, a spokesman for NTM-A/CSTC-A, confirmed that “we’re reevaluating how to proceed.” Hylton added that every aspect of the contract was up for discussion within the command, and he guessed that no decisions would be made about even how to move forward with the bidding process until mid-April at the earliest.

The contract first garnered attention last month, when CNTPO’s connection to Blackwater appeared in a late-February Politico story. The same day the story ran, the Senate Armed Services Committee released a report accusing Blackwater employees of improperly taking hundreds of rifles and pistols for personal use out of a U.S. military weapons depot in Afghanistan intended to supply those very same Afghan policemen.

Scott Amey, the general counsel for the Project on Government Oversight, observed that the military “tried to fit a square peg into a round hole” by giving a counter-narcoterrorism office awarding duties for a police training contract. “The best case scenario now is that this [contract] will operate through an open process that will allow anyone to come to the table,” Amey said.

CNTPO initially got the contract because its existing relationships with the five security contractors meant that it could rapidly award a bid for a mission identified by the military as vital to the U.S. war effort, a process that entailed restricting the eligible pool of bidders. “If the government has an immediate need, it could conduct a limited competition with vendors with proven capabilities” to meet the contract requirements, Amey said.

Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, has identified that need as immediate. “There’s a shortage of trainers,” McChrystal said at a press briefing on March 17. “And we have been very unequivocal in our statement of that, both to Washington, D.C., and of course, more appropriately, to NATO.”

DynCorp’s old contract with the State Department expires in August. Hylton said NTM-A/CSTC-A had not yet made a decision on whether to seek a temporary extension of DynCorp’s contract. Col. John Ferrari, a senior officer in the training command’s programs directorate, was in charge of the decision-making process for the revised contract.

A spokesman for DynCorp, Jason Rossbach, said that the company — which the Iraq inspector general has criticized, along with the State Department, for negligent book-keeping over the police-training contract — awaited the outcome of NTM-A/CSTC-A’s contract restructuring. “We’re interested in bidding, whatever the government decides to do,” Rossbach said.

Fred Roitz, Blackwater’s top contract compliance officer, told the panel that Raytheon instructed Blackwater to hide its shell company Paravant’s affiliation with Blackwater. “Raytheon specifically knew who in fact they were contracting with,” Roitz told Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.). “They did not want to name Blackwater” to the Army. But Roitz said he didn’t know who at Raytheon issued that instruction.

So I called John Kasle, Raytheon’s senior corporate spokesman. As it turned out, he’d been monitoring the hearing. “We point back to Fred Roitz. He has promised to get back to the committee” with that information, Kasle said. “He’s made this claim; it’s up to him to substantiate it.

When pressed about whether Raytheon actually did instruct “Paravant” to hide its affiliation with Blackwater, Kasle didn’t deny it, simply saying instead, “We’re not going to make a comment.” I suggested to him that the committee would most likely follow up for a direct response to the allegation — Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) stated flatly, “Clearly, Raytheon failed overseeing this contract” — but Kasle held his ground. “We’ll wait for the committee” to contact Raytheon before replying, he said. “Mr. Roitz said he didn’t know who asked him [to hide Paravant's ties to Blackwater]; I would suggest that’s the thread to follow. He’s promised to come back to the committee with more information.”

But by whom? The Army civilian official overseeing the contract said that by the time he left his job in January 2009, no decision had been made. And when Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) — who represents Blackwater’s home state — asked the former commander of the Afghan training mission, retired Army Col. Bradley Wakefield, whether he approved the arming, Wakefield bluntly replied, “No.”

There’s no dispute that Blackwater wanted to be armed. There’s also no dispute that its employees were ultimately armed. But the emerging picture is that Blackwater made that decision unilaterally, without the necessary approval from U.S. Central Command and the Army.