It has an uncertain budget, a team of fewer than two dozen military officers and civilians, and barely a year to make its mark on counterinsurgency in Afghanistan before the U.S. begins its transfer of security responsibilities to Afghans. In that time, a new military task force will attempt to More…
Just to be clear: Defense Secretary Robert Gates is not talking about leaving the Pentagon. But when he ultimately does depart, possibly as soon as next year, a leading candidate to succeed him is his undersecretary for policy, Michele Flournoy. And judging by her speech Thursday at the annual conference More…
Steve Kosiak has spent much of his career as a defense analyst frustrated by military bloat. In early 2003, he found it was “impossible to say precisely” how much of the Bush administration’s military buildup was actually attributable to the post-9/11 emergency and how much was pre-existing defense pork. A More…
If it doesn’t make any sense to you to spare defense programs from the spending freeze, pay attention to next Tuesday. At 8:30 a.m., Undersecretary of Defense Michele Flournoy heads to the Council on Foreign Relations to explain the results of the forthcoming Quadrennial Defense Review, the Pentagon’s master planning More…
Whether or not the Obama administration’s spending “freeze” is a hatchet or a scalpel — see Rachel Maddow’s grilling of vice-presidential economist Jared Bernstein yesterday — defense spending is going to be unaffected. Why in the world should that be?
President Obama signed the 2010 defense appropriations bill into law this morning, following a brief bit of legislative theater by Republicans who wanted to hold it hostage to delay health reform. Tom Ricks goes through the bill and finds it only marginally relevant to national security:
At this point in the health-reform debate, observers are well aware that the Republican strategy is to delay the vote as long as possible, even if it means dragging out debate on unrelated bills that GOP leaders support. That agenda was on display in October, when it More…
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
There was a lot of encouraging rhetoric for defense reformers from President Obama in his press conference tonight. Asked about the politics of cutting defense, he didn’t back down, and instead cited “uniform acknowledgement” that the procurement process is broken, citing his former presidential rival, Sen,John McCain (R-Ariz.), for political More…
Has all this bated-breath excitement about Defense Secretary Bob Gates scrubbing the fiscal 2010 Pentagon budget, due next month, been for nothing? Is the defense-spending “spigot” remaining open after all? God will I be embarrassed if so; and according to the Pentagon’s deputy comptroller, it might. From subscription-only Inside More…
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