U.S. Rep. Todd Akin (R-Mo.) is the recipient of the second-largest amount of money from the defense industry during the 2011-2012 election cycle as he begins his campaign to replace a leading voice in the U.S. Senate opposed to defense contracting waste, fraud and abuse.
Earlier this week, Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced a series of Pentagon spending cuts, designed to trim the military’s budget by $100 billion over five years by slowing the rate of spending growth. Initial criticism, if any, came from deficit hawks who view the cuts as too small, and More…
Josh Rogin has a great piece about the differences between Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on the independence and responsibilities of the U.S. Agency for International Development. Clinton wants to integrate USAID’s development missions with diplomatic and defense efforts, particularly in More…
The commission Defense Secretary Robert Gates appointed to investigate how the Army failed to notice the radicalization of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the alleged gunman at Fort Hood, has apparently taken a very structural examination of the failure. Look at this portion of its assessment:
As Hasan’s training progressed,
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
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
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 More…
On Monday, an Iraq veteran named John Guardiano took to the right-leaning op-ed page of The Washington Examiner, a free daily paper in the district, to inveigh against the “Secret Defense Budget Tribunals” of Pentagon chief Bob Gates. Guardiano, troubled by the unusual steps More…
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 More…
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 More…
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