Yesterday, Secretary of Defense Bob Gates told cadets at West Point that “In my opinion, any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should ‘have his head examined,’ as General MacArthur so delicately put it.” I’d like to [...]

SAN FRANCISCO — The Obama administration may have concluded that laws targeting gay Americans are presumably unconstitutional, but it still asked a federal appeals court Friday to refrain for now from striking down the ban on gays serving openly in the military, court documents state. Justice Department lawyers asked the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of [...]

The current budget and deficit debate in America is now dominating the daily headlines. There is even talk of shutting down the government if the budget-cutters don’t get their way. There is no doubt that excessive deficits are a moral issue and could leave our children and grandchildren with crushing debt. But what the politicians [...]

By Nick Schwellenbach, crossposted on POGO’s blog Rolling Stone‘s Michael Hastings has written another article that’s gone viral. Here’s how it opens: The U.S. Army illegally ordered a team of soldiers specializing in “psychological operations” to manipulate visiting American senators into providing more troops and funding for the war, Rolling Stone has learned–and when an [...]

World War II documentary filmmaker Tim Gray knows all about deadlines. He met them daily for years as a TV news and sports reporter. But he’s now working against the most imposing, most important deadline of his career. The men and women whose stories he tells are dying at the rate of 1,000 a day. [...]

Is the United States really more secure if its neighbors view it as narrowly interested only in its own security? Do we want our nation’s reputation to be more about guns and less about helping to fight diseases and recover from natural disasters? Do we win good will and allies by being perceived as selfish? [...]

We’ve tasted this recipe before. A crisis is created. Panic is fomented by politicians, pundits, media, business and others. “Something must be done immediately,” everyone shouts. That something usually becomes other people suffering while those who caused the crisis or screamed the loudest then benefit from the commotion. Iraq’s “weapons of mass destruction” and “million-man [...]

President Obama and the Congress have taken 66% of discretionary spending in the federal budget off the table — the Security Budget — while proposing a freeze to the rest of the budget and deep cuts to some programs that provide necessities for the American people. His budget crystallizes a choice that U.S. presidents have [...]

The defense budget in back in the news — the perennial harbinger of Spring like the first crocuses. This year’s version of the ritualized passion play on Capitol Hill features Secretary Robert Gates’ highly publicized proposal to trim military spending by $78 billion over the next five years. That would amount to roughly $15.5 billion [...]

Spouses of service members are badly stressed from years of long deployments — so stressed that some have taken their own lives. Children who’ve had a parent away at war for almost their entire conscious lives are leaving home to go off to college. And the troops themselves continue to struggle with substance abuse, post-traumatic [...]