Eideard

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From nearly the beginning of his tenure as secretary of defense, Robert Gates set his sights on ending a controversial practice in the U.S. Army known as “stop loss.” Wednesday he announced he’s done it.

“There are no Army soldiers stop-lossed,” Gates announced at a Senate hearing.

“Stop loss” is the Pentagon’s policy of forcing some service members to stay in uniform beyond the date they expected to leave the service.

It’s used during times when the Pentagon needs as many troops as possible, such as at the start of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.

As far back as 2007, just months after taking over as defense secretary, Gates said about stop loss: “It is an issue. It troubles me. And I think it is a strain. “

But he couldn’t eliminate it because tens of thousands of soldiers, many of them experienced sergeants, would have left the Army if not for stop loss. But in March of 2009, he announced that the practice would be phased out by 2011.

And according to an Army spokesman, Lt. Col. Timothy Beninato, as of May 31 there are no more soldiers under stop loss, except for approximately 131 who were previously stop-lossed and are now hospitalized or receiving rehabilitation resulting from wounds or illness incurred while on duty in “a hostile fire” area…

All told, about 120,000 soldiers have been subjected to stop loss orders, the Pentagon says. Under federal law, each of them is entitled to $500 for each month they were stop-lossed…

If you’re a veteran who can lay claim as one of those held captive in the military under the stop loss rule, you can file a claim online at www.defense.gov/stoploss.

And thank you for service above and beyond the contract your government originally made with you.

Yeah – that’s what I thought, too, when I first read it

The U.S. Marine Corps will shrink about 13 percent but refocus as a rapid-reaction force after the war in Afghanistan winds down, a top general said. The service will drop to 186,800 from the current force of 202,000, said Lt. General George Flynn, deputy commandant for combat development and integration.

The figure is more than 10,000 troops greater than before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States, Stars and Stripes reported.

The belt-tightening comes at the direction of U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who ordered a “force structure review” to set the service’s future size, roles and missions…

The service does not expect to see “sustained operations in the future” like Iraq and Afghanistan, Flynn told reporters in a conference call.

But the Marines, which date from 1775 and fought in the Revolutionary War, will still be on call to respond to humanitarian crises, evacuate embassies, rescue Americans stranded overseas, train foreign militaries and, if needed, engage in traditional combat, he said.

Washington and the Pentagon do everything in slow motion. They should be getting down to less than what they had at the beginning of Clinton’s Administration.

Let’s get a little back for taxpayers from that “Peace Dividend”.

Secretary Robert Gates heading home from Afghanistan, once again
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President Obama’s compromise with Republicans on extending tax cuts for the wealthy, which his self-described progressive critics see as a profound betrayal, is bound to intensify a debate that has been bubbling up on liberal blogs and e-mail lists in recent weeks — whether or not the president who embodied “hope and change” in 2008 should face a primary challenge in 2012…

Just last weekend, three liberal writers made the case for taking on Mr. Obama in 2012. Michael Lerner, longtime editor of Tikkun magazine, argued in The Washington Post that a primary represented a “real way to save the Obama presidency,” by forcing Mr. Obama to move leftward. Robert Kuttner, co-founder of The American Prospect and one of the party’s most scathing populist voices, issued a similar call on The Huffington Post, suggesting Iowa as the ideal incubator.

On the same site, Clarence B. Jones, a one-time confidant of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., suggested that liberals should break with Mr. Obama now, just as Dr. King and others did with Lyndon B. Johnson in 1968. “It is not easy to consider challenging the first African-American to be elected president of the United States,” Mr. Jones wrote. “But, regrettably, I believe the time has come to do this.”

Meanwhile, in Iowa, a group known as the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, originally founded to aid Democratic Congressional candidates in 2010, has started broadcasting an advertisement that shows Mr. Obama, in 2008, promising to reverse the tax cuts for the most affluent Americans. The group isn’t advocating a primary challenge just yet — but then, the choice of Iowa as a market seems intended to send a pretty clear warning to the White House.

“On issue after issue, when the public is on his side, this president just refuses to fight,” says Adam Green, the group’s co-founder. “At this point, the strategy is to shame him into fighting.”

All of this would have seemed unthinkable in 2008, when Mr. Obama’s red-white-and-blue visage seemed omnipresent on campuses and along city streets, a symbol to many of liberalism reborn. That, of course, was before the abandonment of “card-check” legislation for unions and of the so-called public option in health care, the escalation in Afghanistan and the formation of the deficit-reduction commission…

Draft Hillary!

And how did someone at the TIMES manage to write a piece like this without mentioning Hillary?

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Defense Secretary Robert Gates has announced some far-reaching proposals for restructuring the massive budget at his agency, including getting rid of the U.S. Joint Forces Command (Usjfcom).

The cuts could mean a loss of up to 3,000 jobs…

The funds could be used for providing 2 or 3 times as many useful, productive jobs.

“We must be mindful of the difficult economic and fiscal situation facing our nation,” Gates told reporters at the Pentagon. “As a matter of principle and political reality, the Department of Defense cannot expect America’s elected representatives to approve budget increases each year unless we are doing a good job, indeed, everything possible to make every dollar count.”

Sounds like Gates is taking advantage of the opportunity to clear out bureaucratic dross. Guaranteed to piss off the pork brigade.

The proposal to eliminate Usjfcom, which is based in Norfolk, Virginia, met with opposition from both the state’s U.S. Democratic senators…

Eliminating Usjfcom is just one of a wide-ranging series of proposals presented by Gates. Others include:

– Eliminating some of the 65 military boards and commissions to cut the budget for them by 25 percent in fiscal year 2011;
– A review of all Defense Department intelligence to eliminate needless duplication;
– Reducing funding for service support contractors by 10 percent a year for each of the next three years;
– Seeking to stop “Brass Creep,” a term former Sen. John Glenn used for situations when higher ranking officers were doing jobs that lower ranking officers could handle…

Gates was adamant that the Pentagon must change its way of thinking about money.

And, uh, that means Congress might have to do the same.

Flying Pork

The Pentagon is out to save $100 billion over the next five years in a major push to cut overhead costs, according to U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates. Gates officially unveiled his plan at a Pentagon news conference announcing he is putting department acquisition chief Ashton Carter in charge of finding where the $100 billion will come from in the budgets beginning in 2012.

“The department’s leadership has already taken strong action in this area, and needs to do more,” Gates said. “Other savings can be found within programs and activities we do need, by conducting them more efficiently. … I’m confident we’ll succeed,” he said…

He has urged President Barack Obama to veto the 2011 defense budget if lawmakers keep programs he considers a waste of money, such as additional C-17 cargo planes or an alternate engine design for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. Gates also recently ordered the restructuring of the F-35 programs because of massive delays and cost overruns.

He has said he would put the savings back into personnel, military units and future war-fighting capabilities…

He said it will also encourage more competition between companies.

“In the rest of the economy, we expect this [competition],” Ashton Carter said. “You get a better computer every year, and cheaper. But we haven’t seen productivity growth in the defense economy, more has been costing more, and we need to reverse that trend and restore affordability to our programs,” he said.

Democrats and Republicans alike consider this blasphemy.

But, take a minute or two and go back 60 years and reflect on where we have come – even after President Eisenhower’s warning about distorting power in Congress and our economy.

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A U.S. congressional committee, slighting the Pentagon for a fourth straight year, cleared continued work on an alternate engine by General Electric Co and Rolls-Royce Group Plc for the multinational F-35 fighter jet program.

The U.S. House of Representatives Armed Services Committee, in its version of a defense spending bill for the fiscal year starting October 1, added $485 million for the program on Wednesday in a move with bipartisan support.

Without competition, Pratt & Whitney, a United Technologies Corp unit, would have a decades-long monopoly on the projected $100 billion engine market for the more than 3,000 F-35s due to be bought by the United States and partner countries.

The Defense Department has tried to kill the second engine for four years as unaffordable and unnecessary. It has failed to persuade Congress, which holds the purse strings.

The panel, one of four congressional committees with jurisdiction over military spending, also approved the purchase of eight Boeing Co advanced F/A-18 Super Hornet fighter jets beyond the 22 the Pentagon had sought along with 12 Boeing EA-18G “Growler” electronic attack aircraft for $2.8 billion.

That action came in a late night amendment sponsored by Rep. Todd Akin, a Republican from Missouri, where the F-18 is manufactured…

The legislation also provides an increase of $88 million for cooperation with Israel on missile defense.

RTFA. The more things change the more they stay the same.

We should continue to throw out the obviously useless. The corporate bootlickers and buttkissers.

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Defense Secretary Robert Gates on Saturday blasted the Pentagon’s “top-heavy” bureaucracy, calling for deep cuts in massive overhead costs at a time when the country faced fiscal trouble.

Gates said ending or scaling back some major weapons programs over the past year had saved billions of dollars, but it represented only a first step towards getting the vast defense budget under control…

Mushrooming administrative costs and a defense bureaucracy overloaded with senior officers and civilian managers threatened to drain away vital funds needed to sustain the military, he said.

Spending on operational and maintenance costs had nearly doubled over the past decade, excluding the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and funds for contract services had grown by some 23 billion during the same period, he said.

Overhead costs meanwhile accounted for about 40 percent of the Defense Department’s budget.

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Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said on Monday that he was replacing the general in charge of the Pentagon’s largest weapons program — the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter — and withholding $614 million in award fees from the contractor, Lockheed Martin.

The surprise announcement came after Mr. Gates had touted the plans for the new plane last year in persuading Congress to kill the more expensive F-22 fighter jet program. But a special Pentagon review team had since projected billions of dollars in cost overruns on the F-35, and Mr. Gates said on Monday that the company needed to absorb some of the extra costs.

Mr. Gates disclosed the reshuffling on the F-35 program as he released the Pentagon’s proposed $708.3 billion spending package for fiscal 2011. Coming after a year in which the Obama administration killed the F-22 and other expensive weapons programs, the Pentagon’s new spending plans represent a $14.8 billion increase over the current totals…

Mr. Gates said the program manager on the F-35, Marine Corps Maj. Gen. David Heinz, would be replaced by a higher-ranking general whose name would be announced soon…

The Pentagon plans to buy more than 2,400 F-35s over the next 25 years, and the Air Force, the Navy and the Marine Corps will each have their own versions of the single-engine fighter. Eight allied nations are also investing in the project and could buy hundreds of planes…

But Pentagon and Congressional auditors have criticized the program in recent years for problems with suppliers, delays in producing the first planes and a flight test program that remains only 2 percent complete.

You don’t need a scalpel to continue cutting pork from the Pentagon hogs. There’s enough spare bacon there to keep NASCAR in hog-jowl jam for a century.

State meeting last November

U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, flying to New Delhi, praised India’s restraint and statesmanship following the 2008 Mumbai attacks and remarked at how both India and Pakistan have kept tensions at a “manageable level.”

Relations between the South Asian neighbors have been strained since India suspended a peace process with Pakistan after the assault on Mumbai by Pakistan-based militants…

“The bombing in Mumbai was a really terrible event and frankly I believe that the Indians responded subsequently with a great deal of restraint and have conducted themselves in a very statesmen-like manner since that attack,” Gates told reporters on his flight to India…

Last month, Gates told the U.S. Senate he believed al Qaeda wanted to provoke a conflict between India and Pakistan in order to destabilize Pakistan. He said it was providing Lashkar-e-Taiba militants — the group blamed for the Mumbai killings — with targeting information to help the group plot attacks in India.

Gates said the United States would be happy to work to help improve India-Pakistan relations, if asked, but added: “I think it’s clear that both sides prefer to deal with this bilaterally and that others not be involved…”

Of course, military-industrial commerce is an important part of Gates’ visit. India is preparing to open the purse-strings for $50 billion worth of death toys. Uncle Sugar wants the biggest chunk. If not all of it.

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The top military commander in Afghanistan warns in a confidential assessment of the war there that he needs additional troops within the next year or else the conflict “will likely result in failure.”

The grim assessment is contained in a 66-page report that the commander, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, submitted to Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates on Aug. 30, and which is now under review by President Obama and his top national security advisers…

In his five-page commander’s summary, General McChrystal ends on a cautiously optimistic note: “While the situation is serious, success is still achievable.”

But throughout the document (.pdf), General McChrystal warns that unless he is provided more forces and a robust counterinsurgency strategy, the war in Afghanistan is most likely lost…

Mr. Obama and his advisers have said they need time to absorb the assessment of the Afghanistan security situation that General McChrystal submitted three weeks ago — a separate report from the general’s expected request for forces — as well as the uncertainties created by the fraud-tainted Afghan elections…

General McChrystal has publicly stated many of the conclusions in his report: emphasizing the importance of protecting civilians over just engaging insurgents, restricting airstrikes to reduce civilian casualties, and sharply expanding the Afghan security forces and accelerating their training…

When you walk in through the door of foreign intervention after 8 years of incompetence and arrogance, 8 years of Republican lies and deceit – you’re not surprised to find a disaster made worse by dollars wasted on a biblical scale.

If you have a conscience, if you care to try to repair the sleazy work done by the Bush-Cheney cohort, then gird your loins for another couple years of war mixed with civil investment that the Pentagon has known how to achieve all along – but, was not allowed to do. As crass as it sounds, even this second half-assed solution leaves the White House in a position to claim “victory” before the 2004 elections – with more of our troops back on American soil than there has been since Bush was elected.