Less than a month after the Pentagon leadership warned it would unwise to abandon the military’s ban on open gay service this year, a fast-moving legislative effort this week has opponents of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” feeling like the law might finally be on the scrapheap.
[Security1] Activists opposed to More…
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…
It’s not just in the Senate Armed Services committee’s mark-up of next fiscal year’s defense bill. While opponents of the military’s ban on open gay service target six senators — five Democrats and one Republican — to insert an amendment abolishing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” this week, over in More…
Now that I’ve praised Defense Secretary Robert Gates, let me highlight an issue on which he’s taking a lot of heat from progressives. Gates has relaxed enforcement of the military’s ban on open gay service. But he’s also committed to finishing a Defense Department survey on military opinion 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…
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.
Haaretz reports on comments the undersecretary of defense for policy, Michele Flournoy, made in Singapore about Iran:
The U.S. has ruled out a military strike against Iran’s nuclear program any time soon, hoping instead negotiations and United Nations sanctions will prevent the Middle East nation from developing nuclear weapons,
Laura Rozen takes a crack at it.
In other words, be willing to try to get back to diplomatic negotiations with Iran, slow down their program, protect regional allies, and pursue targeted sanctions against the Revolutionary Guard.
Wait! Don’t click away from this post yet!
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…
To take one more crack at Adm. Michael Mullen’s comments after a Columbia University address yesterday, it’s certainly clear that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff took pains to keep any military option against Iran as a last resort. But he may have shifted his emphasis about More…
rss