This is one weird comment on President Obama’s proposed repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” from House GOP leader John Boehner (R-Ohio):
Boehner predicted that any action on “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” would lead to a “divisive debate” and “do nothing more than distract the real debate that should
If you didn’t get enough reporting and analysis on the Pentagon’s master planning document, the Quadrennial Defense Review, from my preview piece on Friday, today is your day. This afternoon, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Admiral Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in a briefing More…
President Obama announced in his State of the Union address that national security programs would not be subject to his proposed spending freeze. But that hasn’t stopped Pentagon officials from placing what they consider to be outdated military programs in the budgetary icebox.
In its master planning document for More…
Apropos of my story today about the consistently-ballooning defense budget, Defense News has a leak of the Quadrennial Defense Review, the Pentagon’s big planning document that, among other things, is supposed to shape the budget. This is just a leak of a draft, and not the final document. 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…
I had to staple my hands to my desk to prevent from facepalming after reading this account of a recent talk from Gen. George Casey, the Army chief of staff, about his 2010 priorities and now it’s hard to type:
Restore balance to the Army: Casey discussed the need
It’s been about a month since Adm. Michael Mullen conceded that a Defense Department initiative to expand so-called “dwell time” between Army deployments would be delayed. Today, Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, pegged it to a date: 2012 or 2013.
During a lecture at the More…
Republicans in the Senate are trying to hold the Defense appropriations bill hostage to their efforts to kill the health care bill. A filibuster has already failed. But passage isn’t assured. So that’s when Robert Gates clears his throat.
A pillar of the Republican foreign policy establishment for More…
Earlier this year, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said he would put in place a plan to expand the time that soldiers spend at home between deployments. By 2011, Gates said, he and Army officials wanted to give war-weary soldiers two years at home for every year deployed, up from the More…
Dedicated readers know that since March I’ve been trying to determine how the Obama administration conceives of the actual endgame in Afghanistan-Pakistan — that is, the point at which we can say the mission is successful. The whole strategy is geared around the elimination of al-Qaeda’s safe havens More…
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