defense

Today’s moment of sheer Jamesian confusion comes from Rep. Steny Hoyer’s (D-Md.) disclosure today that Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) is larding the Defense Department appropriations bill with God-knows-what. From a press briefing Hoyer gave earlier:
Mr. Hoyer: …On Thursday we’ll do the Department of Defense Appropriation Act. There are, by the way, over 600 amendments [...]

Much as I agree with Andrew Exum that this Washington Post post-mortem tick tock on the killing of the F-22 is worth reading, this paragraph seems a bit, well, incomplete:
[Defense Secretary Robert Gates] bluntly warned Lockheed Martin that he would slice funding for the more modern F-35 jet if the contracting giant lobbied to build [...]

People have been tweeting at me to provide a roll call for yesterday’s OMG-worth vote to kill the F-22, so here’s one. As it appeared yesterday, the vote was relatively nonpartisan: while the 58-40 tally to end funding for the fighter jet was carried by the Democrats, 15 Republicans joined the successful effort. The votes [...]

Robert Gates has gone to extraordinary lengths to circumvent early lobbying of Capitol Hill by the powerful defense industry.

It’s really, really, really difficult to be optimistic about cutting Pentagon waste. There is a massive amount of entrenched interests — in the services, on the Hill, among the hordes of defense firms just across the Potomac — that exist to ensure the safe delivery of defense contracts to well-heeled and politically connected companies, with [...]

Remember last month, when a Website called Preserve Raptor Jobs began warning that 95,000 jobs would get cut if the Pentagon scrapped the problematic Air Force F-22 Raptor fighter plane? Via Rob Farley, milblogger David Axe points out that even if the very unlikely cuts do come to pass, they probably don’t lead to those [...]

People always talk about The Washington Post’s Bob Kagan as the smart Kagan child, but even if his brother wasn’t Fred Kagan, this column would still be pretty egregious. It begins with the false premise that President Obama is going to cut defense spending and then proceeds to argue that defense spending is stimulative.
On the [...]

Lara Jakes buries the lead in her story about all the money ex-Raytheon lobbyist Bill Lynn will make if he sells his company stock to take the No. 2 spot at the Pentagon:
Testifying before the Senate panel Tuesday, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said stringent ethics rules are a major reason it is difficult to fill [...]

There are lots of things for Defense Secretary Bob Gates to tell the Senate Armed Services Committee this morning during his first round of testimony as President Obama’s Pentagon chief. What’s up with the Iraq troop drawdown and the Afghanistan strategy reviews? How can the United States responsibly close Guantanamo and overhaul detentions and interrogations [...]

A trusted defense source emails me a report from the subscription-only Inside The Pentagon newsletter that seems to herald the first defense-budget chicanery of the Obama administration. The piece, by Christopher J. Castelli, is about how the services are starting to think that the forthcoming Fiscal Year 2010 defense budget, Obama’s first, is going to [...]