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Whenever federal bureaucrats running the nation’s parks get antsy that their purse is likely to shrink, they roll out something long known as the “Washington Monument strategy.” That’s the tried-and-true technique of warning the public that if money isn’t forthcoming, one of the first budget cuts will force the shutting down of the popular obelisk [...]
We began Battleland’s countdown to sequestration a month ago. As of Wednesday, we’re 11% closer to the end of the Pentagon as we know it. That’s slated to happen, according to this provision of the so-called Budget Control Act:
It’s sad that what should be a day of quiet satisfaction – the anniversary of the death of Osama bin Laden, the killer of nearly 3,000 innocents – has degenerated into a political spitball fight. Battleland well remembers Jimmy Carter’s failed mission to rescue the U.S. hostages held by Iran’s government in Tehran 30 years [...]
The Pentagon’s new, high-flying 30-year aircraft-buying blueprint – the Annual Aviation Inventory and Funding Plan Fiscal Years (FY) 2013-2042 – makes for depressing reading. No, not because it predicts the loss of U.S. air superiority — its verbiage on that score is blithely reassuring—but because it evidences the Defense Department’s persistent refusal to acknowledge the [...]
Americans will celebrate Memorial Day next month, and honor those who’ve died while serving to protect the rest of us. But some concerned members of Congress are going to skip their hometown barbeques so they can hit the road: they’ll be warning of a looming half-trillion-dollar cut in defense spending over the next decade (atop [...]
Rep. Todd Akin, R-Mo., has started beginning his meetings of the House Armed Services Committee’s seapower and projection forces subcommittee with a prayer, Congressional Quarterly reports. Sure enough, a quick check of the transcripts – not that Battleland would ever doubt CQ — turns up a recent pair.
This just in from RIA Novosti, the Moscow-based, state-owned news agency: Russian warships will be equipped with NATO navigation and communications systems to improve coordination in anti-piracy missions around the world, Chief of the Russian General Staff Nikolai Makarov said on Wednesday…“We decided to install standard NATO navigation and communications systems on our warships,” Makarov [...]
– Vice President Joe Biden, speaking of his boss’s national-security clout, during a speech in New York Thursday
The Marines have decided to boot Sergeant Gary Stein from the corps with an other-than-honorable discharge for declaring on Facebook that he would refuse to obey unlawful orders issued by President Obama. It’s surprising it took this long. When the nation’s troops get to decide when, or when not, to obey their commander-in-chief (note the [...]
– How much defense contractors have given to Rep. Howard “Buck” McKeon, R-Calif., chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, this election cycle. McKeon is a favorite of the industry, given his fight to prevent the Budget Control Act’s sequestration guillotine from falling onto the nervous neck of the defense industry next year. In comparison, [...]
