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MANSFIELD, Ohio — Seeking to regain the offense in the presidential campaign, Mitt Romney on Monday said President Obama is to blame for the automatic defense-spending cuts looming at the beginning of next year and that those reductions will devastate communities in Ohio and other key political states. Read more: Romney warns of looming defense cuts - Washington Times http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/sep/10/romney-warns-of-looming-defense-cuts/#ixzz267ZLLvIV Follow us: @washtimes on Twitter

President Obama will exempt all military personnel accounts from the $500 billion in defense cuts under sequestration, the Obama administration said in a letter to Capitol Hill on Tuesday. Acting Office of Management and Budget Director Jeffrey Zients told Congress the president is exercising his authority in the Budget Control Act to exempt military personnel from the 10-year sequestration cuts, according to the letter obtained by The Hill. The decision to exempt personnel will place further strain on the budget accounts that defense contractors rely on for weapons programs, should the automatic spending cuts occur.

The U.S. House of Representatives approved an amendment to the 2013 defense appropriations bill that would ban money from being used in violation of federal law prohibiting same-sex marriage in the military. The amendment was introduced by Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), who said that it is “a much needed solution to a problem started by an administration that's prone to ignoring the law.” In a statement released shortly after the legislation passed, King explained that his amendment “prohibits the use of both military funds and facilities for same-sex marriages.” “The military is an entity of the federal government, and federal...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: I got an e-mail this morning from Cal Thomas, and he got an e-mail from Jim Pinkerton. You all know who James Pinkerton is. Pinkerton is on the Fox News media analysis show. And this is a story from the UK Telegraph that these guys were sending back and forth to each other. Cal Thomas sent it to me. The headline of the story -- and it's dated today -- "US Weapons 'Full of Fake Chinese Parts' -- Thousands of United States' warplanes, ships and missiles contain fake electronic components from China, leaving them open to malfunction,...

America's new long-range bomber program is "underway," will involve somewhere between 80 and 100 planes and will be delivered sometime in the mid-2020's. "And that's about all we're saying," Air Force Secretary Mike Donley told reporters. It's been known for some time that the bombers will not fly alone but will be part of a family of systems that may include UAVs and other systems. The really interesting part of all this is the secrecy and why it's so dark. It would seem to indicate several things: that the U.S. does not want potential competitors such as China or Russia...

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It's the most expensive fighter jet ever built. Yet the F-22 Raptor has never seen a day of combat, and its future is clouded by a government safety investigation that has grounded the jet for months. The fleet of 158 F-22s, including those in Alaska, has been sidelined since May 3 after more than a dozen incidents in which oxygen was cut off to pilots, making them woozy. The malfunction is suspected of contributing to at least one fatal accident, in Alaska. At an estimated cost of $412 million each, the F-22s amount to about $65 billion sitting on the...

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D–NV) introduced legislation to raise the debt ceiling this week. In evaluating his plans for future government spending, it becomes clear that budgeting for prudent defense is considered just another line item. While Americans intuitively know that national security is unlike any other category of federal spending, it is often treated with inherent bias through insider budgeting methods. Congress tends to selectively ignore what are called “baselines” used for comparing different spending proposals. This is convenient if a Member of Congress wants to generate more phantom cuts to appease a core audience—or, worse, to not...

"A lot of the spending cuts that we're making should be around areas like defense spending as opposed to food stamps," President Obama told in an interview with NPR.

Representative Paul Ryan (Wisc.-1) and the House GOP released their ten-year budget entitled "The Path to Prosperity" [pdf] to much fanfare on Capitol Hill yesterday, laying out an alternative to President Obama's proposal. Compared to baseline numbers, the Path to Prosperity spends $5.8 trillion less, and $6.2 trillion less than the President's budget over the next ten years. The largest spending cuts come from the discretionary budget, both defense ($830 billion) and non-defense ($1.6 trillion). Rep. Ryan's defense budget accepts the proposals laid out by defense Secretary Robert Gates and endorsed by President Obama, but cuts spending in every other...

US naval aviation back on the rise © Northrop Grumman How Northrop Grumman sees the carrier deck of 2020 Retired Vice Adm Robert Dunn remembers being called to the Secretary of the Navy's office. It was 1989 and the US Navy was still at the peak of its Cold War, 600-ship glory. Defence spending, however, was already in decline and the navy's top civilian, Henry Garrett, had a tough decision to make. As deputy chief of naval operations for aviation, Dunn's portfolio included two projects for a carrier-based, long-range strike aircraft - a re-engined Grumman A-6E Intruder called the A-6F...

http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2011-02-14-budgetinside14_ST_N.htm?csp=34news For five years running, two presidents have tried to eliminate funding for a backup engine on a fighter jet, a program Defense Secretary Robert Gates calls unnecessary. Congress, however, has rebuffed the White House and continues to fund the $465-million-a-year alternate engine for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, amid intense lobbying by General Electric, the corporate giant working with Rolls-Royce to develop that engine. General Electric's aggressive outreach ranges from running ads on the subway cars that congressional staffers take to work to deploying dozens of well-connected lobbyists to Capitol Hill and the Pentagon.... ...Among the new lawmakers backing...

Will this be the year that Congress takes after the defense budget, seeing it not as holy writ laid down by an unchallengeable priesthood but rather as a political document hammered out by competing bureaucracies, each with long-standing vested interests? It's a bubbling brew out there, the Tea Party Republicans keen to slash any and all federal programs, joined in a potential alliance of convenience with liberal Democrats seeking to kill big-ticket weapons slammed as pork-barrel waste or Cold War antiques. The Obama administration's proposed defense budget for fiscal year 2012, rolled out Monday afternoon by Secretary of Defense Robert...

Supreme Court justices seemed in general agreement Tuesday that the best way to resolve a long-running, billion-dollar dispute between the government and two big defense contractors is to say, in Justice Antonin Scalia's words, "Go away."... That was the apparent sentiment of the court toward a contract dispute over the A-12 Avenger attack plane, canceled by the Pentagon in 1991 when Richard Cheney was defense secretary...

Aerojet, a GenCorp company, announced today that it shipped the last F-22 Raptor forward boom to The Boeing Company in Seattle, Wash. This completed the 10th lot of a procurement that spanned 17 years in support of the Boeing/Lockheed Martin/U.S. Air Force team. Aerojet has been under contract to The Boeing Company on the F-22 Raptor air dominance fighter program since 1993 and has delivered 394 booms. The company was honored by Boeing as its Supplier of the Year in 2005 and 2007, and its gold and silver supplier for 2009 and 2010. "Our success is a testament to the...

On August 31 President Obama announced the end of “combat operations” in Iraq, while proclaiming “the military efforts the nation has made since 9/11 had shortchanged investments in our own people and contributed to record deficits.” It’s no secret that progressives consider Defense as a waste of money that would be better served funding more entitlement programs. As Obama promised them “What I won’t do is cut back on investments like education.” As a Commander and Chief Obama seems determined to throw the military under the bus and squander its budget. Latest projections from the Congressional Budget Office estimate that...

Alongside another controversial provision in the 2011 defense authorization bill pending in Congress is language that illustrates the continuing challenge of taxpayer support for elective abortions. Included in the version of the bill that emerged from the Senate Armed Services Committee is an amendment sponsored by Sen. Roland Burris (D–IL) that would allow the use of military facilities around the world for “pre-paid” abortions.The policy at stake has a long history, but for most of the past four decades, decisions by various Administrations and laws adopted by Congress have limited public funding for abortions in military hospitals as well as...

Virginia officials reacted with bipartisan dismay on Monday to Defense Department budget shifts that will cost the state thousands of jobs in coming years and will dramatically impact the economies of the Norfolk area and Northern Virginia. Most of the immediate reaction revolved around Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates's proposal to close the U.S. Joint Forces Command. It is a major employer in Hampton Roads, including Norfolk and Virginia Beach, whose elimination could translate into the loss of 6,100 military, civilian and contractor jobs in the region. But a proposal to slash the Pentagon's budget for military contractors over the...

WASHINGTON -- Officials briefed on the decision say Defense Secretary Robert Gates plans to eliminate a major military command in Norfolk, Va., and try to cut the Pentagon's use of outside contractors by 10 percent next year. The plan was to be announced at a Pentagon press conference on Monday. It is part of a broader effort to trim $100 billion from the military's mammoth budget in the next five years, as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan begin to wind down and Congress turns its attention more to domestic priorities.

President Barack Obama is signing legislation to fund his troop surge in Afghanistan. Before Congress passed it on Tuesday, the bill was stripped of money for domestic stimulus programs. Obama was signing it in a low-ley Oval Office session Thursday.