bob gates

Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), the House speaker, waded into the media-manufactured controversy Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s London speech on “Charlie Rose” last night, according to Greg Sargent, who’s got the transcript:
“Let me say this about about General McChrystal, with all due respect,” Pelosi said, according to a transcript sent my way by a Pelosi aide. “His [...]

Ben Smith finds some news in Sarah Palin’s all-over-the-place Hong Kong speech.
Despite the need to move men and material by air into theaters like Afghanistan, the Obama Administration sought to end production of our C-17s, the work horse of our ability to project long range power. Despite the Air Force saying it would increase future [...]

The sun rose today and its gravitational force kept the planet twisting around it through the void, so naturally Fred and Kim Kagan, the neoconservative wing of counterinsurgency, have put out a call for between 40,000 and 45,000 additional troops to be sent to Afghanistan in the next year. Both Kagans advised the McChrystal strategy [...]

Ahead of Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s resource request for the Afghanistan war, which should be finalized today-ish, Defense Secretary Gates is already settling on areas of agreement, such as adding “enabler” assets to the  increases in troop levels that President Obama ordered in the spring:
The 2,500 to 3,000 troops include explosive ordnance disposal teams, route clearance [...]

Iran is placing extraordinary emphasis on its ballistic missile and WMD development programs. The ballistic missile infrastructure in Iran is now more sophisticated than that of North Korea, and has benefited from broad, essential, long-term assistance from Russia and important assistance from China as well. Iran is making very rapid progress in developing the Shahab-3 [...]

In sharp contrast to the Lieberman, Boehner and Cantor statements is this missile-defense-shield reaction from Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), who must find issuing such things to be a tiresome and unfortunate concession to the reality of being surrounded by dishonest people. I’m going to highlight the good parts.
President Obama has made a sound choice that [...]

According to a Pentagon fact sheet on the now-scrapped plans for a missile shield in Poland and the Czech Republic, Defense Secretary Bob Gates and the Joint Chiefs of Staff “unanimously” agreed to get rid of the shield in favor of “technology that is proven, cost-effective, and adaptable to an evolving security environment.”
Among their baseline [...]

So let’s total up what was gained and what was lost by the Obama administration’s decision to scrap the never-built ballistic missile shield in Poland and the Czech Republic. In favor of abandonment:
1. Russia, a much more important country than either Poland or the Czech Republic, viewed it as needlessly provocative.
2. The thing was never [...]

Osama bin Laden just released a new diatribe, available for download here if you’re interested, and it apparently hits the notes you’d expect: endless war if the United States continues the fight in Afghanistan; President Obama is no different than George W. Bush; “neo-conservatives and the Israel Lobby” control the United States through their iniquity, [...]

Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) may have made quite the bureaucratic gambit today by calling for an acceleration of the schedule to train Afghan security forces ahead of any new U.S. troop deployment. That position attracted the support (with caveats) of respected counterinsurgency theorist-practitioners like John Nagl of the Center for a New American Security. Accordingly, [...]