Defense Spending

Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts Democrat who defeated Scott Brown for the U.S. Senate, held what the Boston Herald reports as an "awkward" first press conference in Boston with Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick.

The Hill reports:

The House voted Thursday to override steep cuts to the Pentagon’s budget mandated by last summer's debt deal and replace them with spending reductions to food stamps and other mandatory social programs.

In speaking about U.S. defense, Indiana Senate candidate Richard Mourdock told the Times of Northwest Indiana that “There's always going to be a lot of duplication. We look today at the historical setup of Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, Coast Guard. There's a lot of duplication and bureaucracy right there. In the 21st century, is that necessary? I'm not sure that it is.”

House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) delivered the following remarks today during a hearing on replacing the budget sequester:

Bluffton, S.C.
Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich called plans to sequester $600 billion from the defense budget “totally destructive” and “very dangerous to the survival of the country.” The cuts, scheduled to begin in 2013, will automatically occur because of the supercommittee’s inability to cut $1.2 trillion over the next ten years from the federal budget.

Recent Republican presidential candidate debates have featured a 30-second ad sponsored by the Peter G. Peterson Foundation in support of more cuts to defense spending. The commercial, however, is misleading.

Congressman Randy Forbes is starting an initiative called, "Strong Defense, Strong America." "Some argue that another $600 billion of defense cuts will not hurt America," Forbes writes in his introductory letter. "We can do more with less, they say. Or, we can just do less. They are wrong."

Reuters: Jon Kyl says he'll leave the super committee if it wants to cut defense spending further.

Megan McArdle: Did the Great Depression gave us a generation of the best and brightest in local government?

In today's Washington Post, Robert Samuelson argues that it was liberal protectors of the entitlements, not the Tea Party, that "won" the most in last week's debt deal. The military, he says, was the real loser:

John Bolton has just issued a thoughtful statement raising “serious questions ... about the national-security implications of the proposed deal to raise the Federal debt ceiling.” Bolton calls attention to the worrisome short-term defense cuts that the deal makes likely, and to the huge medium- and long-term cuts that the deal’s triggering mechanism makes possible.

Members of Congress and their staff who know and care about defense are somewhere between alarmed and panicked at the emerging shape of the debt ceiling deal. (Consider this amazing on-the-record statement by Senator Joe Lieberman’s communications director to Jennifer Rubin just a few minutes ago: “Senator Lieberman is very concerned about rumors that the d

Former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton just released the following statement, highlighting the danger defense spending faces in the budget deficit negotiations: