national security

A joint statement from the defending defense group at the American Enterprise Institute, the Foreign Policy Initiative, and the Heritage Foundation:

Jose Rodriguez, a former National Clandestine Service chief at the CIA, recently made the case that the search for Osama bin Laden was long, hard, and full of twists and turns.

In “Politician-in-Chief,” Steve Hayes writes about President Obama’s frustration with, as Hayes puts it, Republican “criticism of the difficult decisions he is facing as president on matters of war and peace.”

As Washington wrangles over the size of the federal budget in a time of fiscal austerity, Congress is debating whether to hold President Obama to his promise of adequately funding the modernization of America’s nuclear arsenal and infrastructure in exchange for the Senate’s passage of the controversial New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) with the Russia in December 2010. The debate has pit liberal lawmakers like Congressman Edward Markey (D, Mass.), who advocate global nuclear disarmament, against Congressman Michael Turner (R, Ohio) and other national security stalwarts, w

Ten years ago this week, the U.S. government opened the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba detention facility. And three years ago this month, shortly after his inauguration, President Barack Obama ordered Guantanamo shuttered within one year. For a variety of reasons, Gitmo remains open, with approximately 171 detainees still detained there. And so, human rights organizations, detainee lawyers, and former detainees are doing their best to shame the U.S. government into closing the facility.

There is a certain irony, as well as much truth, in Defense Secretary Leon Panetta’s drumbeat of warnings about the consequences of further cuts to U.S. military budgets of the sort threatened under the current deficit reduction law.

House Budget chair Paul Ryan, along with House Committee on Armed Services chair Buck McKeon and Bill Young, chairman of the Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense, have written a letter to Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and OMB director Jack Lew, urging the Obama administration officials not to take a math-based approach to determining our national security strategy.

Now that the Great Debt Ceiling Deal has become the law of the land, it’s time to consider what just happened to America, and in particular to America’s armed forces. On the one hand, it’s complicated. On the other hand, it’s ugly.

Here’s the situation with respect to defense spending, which Speaker Boehner fought for yesterday, with some (very limited) success:

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.

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: