From the Christian Science Monitor : WASHINGTON - A top Air Force general, crossing swords with Pentagon leadership, says a proposed cap on the number of F-22 stealth fighters puts America at "high risk" of compromising military strategy. In a June 9 letter to a senator, Gen. John Corley, commander of the Air Force's Air Combat Command, wrote: "In my opinion, a fleet of 187 F-22s puts execution of our current national military strategy at high risk in the near to mid term." General Corley's letter, obtained by the Monitor Thursday, came in response to a query from Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R) of Georgia, where parts of the F-22 Raptor are built. The 187 cap is the symbolic centerpiece of Defense Secretary Robert Gates's budget request, which aims to rein in defense procurement costs. He has said it is time to wrap up the program to buy the $140 million-a-copy plane. The Air Force had long disagreed, calling for as many as 381 planes as recently as last year,...

... with throw-down words by Brookings fellow Michael O'Hanlon at the Washington Post : After three months of very impressive decisions regarding national security, President Obama made perhaps his first significant mistake. It concerns the defense budget, where his plans are insufficient to support the national security establishment over the next five years. Thankfully, this mistake can be fixed before it causes big harm -- either by Congress this year or the administration itself next year. The administration is hardly slashing funds for defense; it is simply adopting a policy of zero real growth in the "base budget" (the part that does not include war costs, which are too unpredictable to include in this analysis). Specifically, the base budget is to grow 2 percent a year over the next five years. But with the inflation rate expected to average over 1.5 percent, the net effect is essentially no real growth. Cumulatively, that would leave us about $150 billion short of...

Here's the breaking news of the latest defense supplemental : Top House and Senate Democrats reached a tentative agreement on an almost $100 billion war funding bill Monday, including a generous new line of credit for the International Monetary Fund. At the core of the measure is President Barack Obama's war funding request, which included $76 billion for Pentagon operations. But the IMF funding is a top priority of Obama, who pledged the $100 billion line of credit at April's G-20 summit in London to help developing countries deal with the troubled global economy. Of course, that little extra for the IMF is all there is, right? Uh, not quite. The measure is expected to include eight huge C-17 cargo jets sought by the Boeing Co. and its allies on Capitol Hill such as Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and Rep. Norm Dicks, D-Wash. The planes are on a list of program eliminations announced by Obama last month, but the C-17 program has tons of support on Capitol Hill, and the ch...

This will really help ratchet down tensions regarding a possible new Korean war (as well as get us prepared for that military draft Kilroy is worried about ): US Army Chief of Staff General George Casey today insisted that the army was “prepared” to fight a war against North Korea, in the event one broke out. Given the ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Gen. Casey conceded that “it would probably take us a little bit longer to shift gears” into fighting a more conventional conflict with the massive North Korean army. You may recall that Casey is the fellow who promised us the other day that the Pentagon was planning on staying in both Afghanistan and Iraq for at least another ten years . What's happening here is that (a) we are reaping the whirlwind of nearly two decades without a real foreign policy for dealing with the world that was destabilized by the end of the Cold War; and (b) we are being prepared for a return to the permanent war state necessary to keep the Defense bu...

Here is the current news : With US military commitments to Afghanistan forever on the rise, and the president still tenatively planning to slash the Iraq force by August of next year, budget documents from the Pentagon suggest that the costs of the war in Afghanistan will eclipse the war in Iraq in 2010. Of the $130 billion the Obama Administration is seeking in its 2010 budget for overseas missions, $65 billion is allocated for Afghanistan and only $61 billion for Iraq. Vice Admiral Steve Stanley says “this request is where you’re going to first see the swing of not only dollars or resources, but combat capability, from the Iraqi theater into the Afghan theater.” In other words: no Iraq withdrawal dividend is in the cards, as I explained in detail five months ago , well before the current administration took office. Military interventionism--either Bush style or Obama style--is expensive. That's why--even after electing a President who promised us change-- the Defense Budget con...

This was predictable: When aspects of the Pentagon 2010 budget were released last months, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates emphasized that it was a “fundamental overhaul” of the budget, and said it shifted spending priorities from wasteful, high-priced weapons programs in favor of fighting against insurgencies. Yet now that the budget has been unveiled, one of the most striking aspects is that it actually seeks a 5.6% spending increase for weapons procurement, with increases in some projects more than offsetting the previously revealed cuts in others . The shift increases the focus on unmanned drones and surveillance capabilities. All in all, the military budget will continue to grow, just in different areas than it had previously. Among those aspects seeing new record levels is the “black budget,” which includes all the classified and secret operations the military engages in. That will see $50 billion in 2010. Around 7.5% of all military spending is now secret. Britain, by contras...

Snippets from WaPo [go check for yourself to insure that they are not out of context]: It was Democrats who stuffed an estimated $524 million in defense earmarks that the Pentagon did not request into the 2008 appropriations bill, about $220 million more than Republicans did, according to an independent estimate. Of the 44 senators who implored Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates in January to build more F-22 Raptors -- a fighter conceived during the Cold War that senior Pentagon officials say is not suited to probable 21st-century conflicts -- most were Democrats. And last July, when the Navy's top brass decided to end production of their newest class of destroyers -- in response to 15 classified intelligence reports highlighting their vulnerability to a range of foreign missiles -- seven Democratic senators quickly joined four Republicans to demand a reversal. They threatened to cut all funding for surface combat ships in 2009. ... But a spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Harry ...

... and to kill it we're going to need a cross, garlic, and a consecrated sword to cut off the head after we stake it through the heart. Chalmers Johnson and Tom Engelhart lay out the Death Spiral at the Pentagon today, in a must-read article . Here's the tiniest taste: Recently, reviewing lobbying disclosure reports, the Washington Times discovered "that 18 of the top 20 recipients of federal bailout money spent a combined $12.2 million lobbying the White House, the Treasury Department, Congress, and federal agencies during the last quarter of 2008." Citibank alone, according to the New York Times, fielded "an army of Washington lobbyists," plunking down $1.77 million in lobbying fees just in the fourth quarter of last year. And it isn't only sinking financial institutions begging for federal dollars that have bolstered their Washington lobbying corps. So have the biggest U.S. armaments companies – "drastically," according to reporter August C...