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Straus Military Reform Project
| To Help You Sort through the Numbers DOD Will Release on Monday (Analysis) |
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February 9, 2012 |
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| I thought the short piece below might help people better analyze and report on the defense spending budget that will be released on Monday, February 13. As you know, DOD has already released some numbers; however, they are quite incomplete. They do not even cover all Pentagon spending, let alone all defense-related spending. Using the Pentagon's press release on Monday will likely mean missing the more complete picture. I try to explain below, and I address where you can find a more complete display of the numbers--all of them. |
Straus Military Reform Project
| Some Truthful Insight into the War and about War and Ethics (Miscellaneous) |
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February 6, 2012 |
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| Circulating today in the New York Times and Armed Forces Journal is a remarkable exposure of what is occurring today in Afghanistan--a situation not accurately reported to the American public, and of course Congress. Col. Danny Davis (USA) is the officer making this exposure possible. It will not surprise some, but it will also come as news to many, perhaps because they have consciously or unconsciously chosen to accept a more comforting view of the un-remedial situation in Afghanistan after 10 years of American conflict there. To Col. Davis we all owe a debt of thanks and support, explains Straus Military Reform Project Director Winslow Wheeler. |
Straus Military Reform Project
| Chuck Spinney on the F-35 (Analysis) |
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January 30, 2012 |
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| Chuck has written a new piece at Time's Battleland blog summarizing the problems that are deep in the F-35's genes. It makes for quick but informative reading, and he provides links to more for those who want t probe further. He says he's going to write more on the F-35; I am looking forward to it: to understand why the F-35 is such a colossal failure degrading our defenses in a quite literal way is to understand our defense problems fundamentally. |
Straus Military Reform Project
| Wrong Again (Miscellaneous) |
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January 25, 2012 |
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| As Romney, Gingrich, AEI and now Heritage (below) are saying to repump the defense budget, our forces have shrunk, and below Heritage even admits to this occurring during huge budget growth. And yet, the solution remains the same: more money, more of the very same programs that in our limited recent wisdom we didn't build. They fail to understand that more F-22s, more Seawolf subs, and disinterring the Army's zombies will make our problems worse, even if the budget zoomed up to meet their increasingly outlandish wishes, explains Straus Military Reform Project Director Winslow Wheeler. |
Straus Military Reform Project
| Sequester Not All It's Cracked Up to Be (Miscellaneous) |
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January 18, 2012 |
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| Based on some insights from some deep-in-the-weeds budget geeks several weeks ago, I have been waiting for some sort of public acknowledgement like the important article below from Emelie Rutherford of Defense Daily, explains Straus Military Reform Project Director Winslow Wheeler. |
Straus Military Reform Project
| It's Not Just the Politicians Who Have Cheapened the Defense Debate (Opinion) |
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January 11, 2012 |
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| I recall from early in my career when Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-AZ) took to the floor of the Senate to attack the allegedly scurrilous report that the B-1 bomber would cost as much as $60 million a copy: in truth, it turned out to cost $200 million per copy. I also remember when Sen. Dale Bumpers (D-AR) opposed keeping battleships in the Navy because of their "teak deck:" In peacetime, the Iowa class battleships did lay wood on top of their 7.5 inch thick steel decks. No one needs to be reminded that Congressman Buck McKeon (R-CA) and Leon Panetta (formerly D-CA) have termed any further cuts in the defense budget to be "catastrophic:" If returning to 2007 levels of defense spending is so terrible, why did Donald Rumsfeld and Robert Gates not tell us back then? |
Straus Military Reform Project
| New Articles and Information on the F-35 (Miscellaneous) |
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December 14, 2011 |
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| This morning, three publications reported more (and important) information about a report submitted to Acting Acquisition Czar Robert Kendall in November about the F-35. This "Quick Look Report" was previously reported by Bloomberg News (Tony Capaccio). Today's articles expand the coverage of the contents of the report. These articles by Jason Sherman and colleagues at Inside Defense, Bill Sweetman of the Ares Defense Technology Blog, and Bob Cox at the Fort Worth Star Telegram are below. |
Straus Military Reform Project
| Is Leon Panetta the Right Man to be Secretary of Defense? (Opinion) |
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December 13, 2011 |
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| With his own words, Leon Panetta has shown that he is little more than a mouthpiece for keeping the defense budget at historically high levels and is incapable of coping with the coming era of modest (yes, modest) Pentagon budget reductions. Using DOD's budget history and the ongoing decay (not a typo) of our military forces at ever increasing spending levels as my perspective, I seek to explain in an essay that is running this morning at Time Magazine's Battleland blog. My thanks to journalist Mark Thompson for running this piece. |
Straus Military Reform Project
| Corrupt and Self-Perpetuating (Miscellaneous) |
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November 30, 2011 |
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| "Corrupt officer corps?" An overstatement? You be the judge.
The first article is yet another in USA Today's Tom Vandenbrook's long and continuing series about DOD's "mentor" program. It describes corrupt behavior in indisputable terms. The second by POGO's Ben Freeman describes how the general officer corps has reversed former SecDef Gates' attempt at a modest reduction in officer bloat, a reversal enabled by Leon Panetta. (What next should we expect from this politician occupying the top position in America's most important national security agency?)
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Straus Military Reform Project
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