WASHINGTON: Congress must act by fall — before the election — and pass some sort of answer to sequestration, says the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Sen. Carl Levin told reporters that his colleagues are beginning to focus on the fact that layoff notices for hundreds of thousands of defense and government jobs… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: The United States is still the world’s indispensable nation and we’ll probably avoid sequestration, albeit by the skin of our teeth. That’s the modestly reassuring message from the unlikely duo of Michèle Flournoy, who recently left her job as under secretary of defense for policy, and Dov Zakheim, Pentagon comptroller under George W. Bush.… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: The House passed the annual defense spending bill this afternoon, 299 votes to 120, after two days of amendments and debate that hit election-year hot buttons hard but largely ignored substantive military issues or the looming threat of sequestration. “If January comes and the Budget Control Act remains in effect as currently written, everything… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON — The House passed a defense budget Friday that exceeds the deal cut by Congress and President Barack Obama last summer, and that would have to be paid for with cash taken from poverty programs, health care and the federal workforce.

VIRGINIA BEACH, VA: In an era of shrinking budgets, the military’s future is less about buying new hardware than making better use of what it already has, the armed forces’ top officer said yesterday, and that kind of change requires focusing not on equipment but on people. “It’s the human dimension that will get us… Keep reading →

VIRGINIA BEACH, VA: The Pentagon should brace for another $250 billion or more in cuts even if sequestration does not occur and must revolutionize how and what it buys, warned Hoss Cartwright, former vice-chairman of the Joint Staff, in a speech that savaged sacred cows from the Joint Strike Fighter to cybersecurity to the AirSea… Keep reading →

CAPITOL HILL: The vice-chiefs of the Army and Marine Corps warned legislators today that sequestration would force the military and the nation to break enlistment contracts with up to 225,000 troops who would have to be precipitately discharged to save money. “We would absolutely not be able to keep faith with our people,” said Gen.… Keep reading →

The GOP talks tough on deficits but fiscal discipline clearly would not apply to defense spending under a Romney administration. CNNMoney reports that: “Compared to the Pentagon’s current budget, Romney’s plan would lead to $2.1 trillion in additional spending over the next ten years, according to an analysis conducted for CNNMoney by Travis Sharp, a… Keep reading →

The U.S. military can jump-start commercialization of energy innovations by serving as a test bed for new ideas, top Department of Defense officials say. Dorothy Robyn, Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Installations and Environment, told the Edison Foundation’s Powering the People 2.0 conference in Washington March 22 that DOD manages over 300,000 buildings –… Keep reading →

The cost of building Virginia-class attack submarines could grow by up to $600 million if Congress signs off on the Navy’s proposal to slip a Virginia from 2014 to 2018. Under heavy pressure to cut budgets, the Navy wants to reduce sub-building expenses in the short term, even at the price of increasing the program’s… Keep reading →