For the first time, the Department of Defense has established an office to guide policy on emerging non-traditional military activities like compliance with the rule of law, humanitarian emergencies and human rights. It’s a bureaucratic change that effectively frames international legitimacy as a security issue, a reflection of the legacy More…
Something to warm the cockles of Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ heart: The White House might have disagreed with him over a legislative push to repeal the ban on open gay military service, but President Obama is backing him on opposition to a second engine for the Joint Strike Fighter.
Gates More…
A fresh-out statement from Geoff Morrell, chief spokesman for Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, reacting to the proposed legislative language for repealing the military’s ban on open gay service and the general legislative strategy of putting the repeal in the fiscal 2011 defense authorization bill:
“Secretary Gates continues
As reported here on Thursday, the House Armed Services Committee set the Obama administration’s plans for closing the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay back significantly last week. Marking up the next fiscal year’s defense bill, the panel voted unanimously to prevent the Defense Department from spending any money to buy More…
Politico takes a look at the coalescing roles of Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton in the Obama administration, a story of two similarly disposed wise (wo)men who have forged a partnership remarkably free of the Foggy Bottom-Pentagon infighting or upstaging that has plagued More…
After a day of trying to get an official response here to the House Armed Services Committee’s ban on funding the Thomson Corrections Center to house Guantanamo detainees, here’s Lt. Col. Robert Ditchey with the reaction:
* We recognize Congress’ responsibilities and the Committee’s important oversight interests.
* We
Next year’s defense bill pretty much demolishes the Obama administration’s jury-rigged plan to close the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay by exporting detainees to an Illinois prison. But that’s not all the joy it brings into the world: It also picks a fight with Defense Secretary Robert Gates by More…
Musing on Defense Secretary Robert Gates’s speech Saturday about the mutually distorting relationship between unsustainable defense budgets and political courage, Marc Ambinder makes a complex and intriguing discovery while mining through one of the daily contracts bulletins that the Pentagon emails reporters. Check it out.
GUANTANAMO BAY — Two weeks’ worth of proceedings in the pre-trial hearing of Omar Khadr found an unexpected meta-conclusion this afternoon as the public affairs shop in the Office of the Secretary of Defense banned four reporters from returning to Guantanamo Bay. Their offense: reporting the name of a witness More…
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Most defense secretaries find themselves frustrated by the labyrinthine system in place to approve military sales to partner countries. Export controls are complex, bureaucratic things designed to place multiple tiers of checks to err on the side of keeping technologies that the More…
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