Weekdays at 5 p.m. is a sacred time of day for defense reporters, and not just because of the promise of imminent alcohol. Come rain, shine or economic collapse, 5 p.m. is when the Pentagon emails out its list of contracts awarded that day, a laundry list of numbing, flat More…
Steve Clemons looks at the high-profile globetrotting of Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Vice President Joe Biden and asks: What about Bob?
Gates hangs back in contrast, advising, lurking — and laying the groundwork for change with Russia, China, even perhaps Iran.
Gates has momentarily come out
Abu Muqawama, reading a story from The Washington Post about the cost overruns of the Army’s/SAIC’s/Boeing’s Future Combat Systems, remarks:
SAIC’s executive vice president for government affairs, Arnold Punaro, is rumored to be the next Army Secretary. It is my understanding that Punaro is a great American, but
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…
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…
Let it never be said that President Obama is cutting defense.
Obama’s budget outline today doesn’t really include the defense budget. What it includes is the top-line principles for the defense budget — the big big number of $663.7 billion — but the details are still subject to Defense Secretary More…
I keep getting sidetracked on this, but Colin Clark at DOD Buzz had a provocative post the other day about how President Obama has already missed his chance at reforming the Pentagon budget. Basically, the trouble all began by leaving Bob Gates in place as defense secretary. Compounding More…
Noting that the Progressive Policy Institute is holding a panel on the defense budget with Rep. John Spratt (D-N.C. S.C.), the chairman of the House Budget Committee, former McCain campaign mouthpiece Michael Goldfarb of the Weekly Standard remarks, “Translation: Only defense has to worry about spending discipline,” More…
Earlier today I was chatting with a Pentagon official — anonymously, of course — about the Defense Department’s forthcoming fiscal 2010 budget. My source noted that Michael Vickers is one of a “small group” of people trying to harmonize the goodie-bag-filled budget request from the outgoing administration with the More…
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 More…
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