Speaking of Jim Jones, President Obama’s national security adviser, his speech to the Washington Institute for Near East Policy last night also offered an early glimpse of the administration’s long-awaited National Security Strategy. (I hear it’s going to actually come out the week after next, but the broad contours More…
The New York Times has a thorough overview of the Obama administration’s forthcoming nuclear-weapons policy. Anonymous administration officials tell the paper to expect “thousands” of weapons to be eliminated from the U.S. nuclear stockpile, commensurate with President Obama’s Prague speech outlining a nuclear-free world, and modernization of the remaining More…
Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Adm. Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have just begun their Pentagon budget and QDR press briefings. Here’s what they’re asking Congress to approve for the next year: $548.9 billion for the so-called base budget next year, excluding the cost of More…
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 But that hasn’t stopped Pentagon officials from placing what they consider to be outdated military programs in the budgetary icebox.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…
It sure looks that way. As I mentioned in a previous post, Defense News got a leaked draft copy of the Quadrennial Defense Review, an important Pentagon planning document that will be officially unveiled next week. But reading down into its guts, the draft references a document that doesn’t 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…
This Colin Clark lead about how the Defense Department under Secretary Bob Gates is conceiving of the upcoming Quadrennial Defense Review — a huge top-to-bottom review of U.S. defense needs and priorities — is just full of win:
It sounds almost Chinese. The five threats. The five challenges.
On Monday I mused on a degree of lassitude evident in near-to-long-term defense planning, and at Small Wars Journal, Steven Metz of the Army War College goes way further. After spending a few days at a Defense Department forum that tried to think through what the threats More…
rss