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Blindly Funding America's Armed Forces
Tweet Share on Facebook May 26, 2011 Comment (2)The U.S. military may have under its command the most highly resourced and disciplined armed force in history, but the same cannot be said of its accountants. Faced with the specter of severe spending cuts--at least by Defense Department standards--the Pentagon has vowed to identify savings by reforming its book-keeping system. The objective, according to an article in this week’s DefenseNews, is “to make DoD auditable by 2017.”
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Defense Secretary Robert Gates's Missed Opportunity
Tweet Share on Facebook May 19, 2011 Comment (2)Back in the 1940s, columnist Joe Alsop described then-Secretary of War Henry Stimson as a “granitic statue to the old virtues.” The same could be said of Stimson’s current successor, Robert Gates. When Gates steps down as Secretary of Defense later this year, as he is scheduled to do, he’ll be taking his signature integrity, candor, and sense of noblesse oblige along with him. In a town clamoring with partisan orotundity, Gates distinguished himself with straight talk to leaders of both parties.
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U.S. Foreign Policy Repeats the '90s
Tweet Share on Facebook May 12, 2011 CommentIs it just me, or does our geopolitical soundtrack play like a 1990s remix?
Americans marked the killing of Osama bin Laden with a nation-wide block party, not unlike their celebration of Desert Storm, the 1991 operation that ejected the Iraqi army from Kuwait. Just as liberating a corrupt Arab emirate exorcised the demons of Vietnam, it seems, so has the killing of a mass murderer with a bad dye job salved the burden of an endless war on radical Islam.
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Bin Laden Killing Gives Obama Clout in Middle East Peace Deal
Tweet Share on Facebook May 6, 2011 Comment (5)With the deletion of the world’s most wanted terrorist, the deleter in chief should invest his newfound diplomatic and political capital in the Levantine Middle East, where the whirlwind of political unrest is sowing opportunities for a peace deal.
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What Actually Motivated Osama bin Laden
Tweet Share on Facebook May 3, 2011 Comment (7)After 10 years of waiting, billions of dollars spent, and thousands of lives lost, there was something anticlimactic about Osama bin Laden’s violent demise.
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