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National Security Strategy MiPAL has been updated with a Military Review article presenting guiding principles for stability and reconstruction, a Congressional hearing assessing the impact of U.S. export controls on national security, a Center for Strategic and International Studies report analyzing defense finance, remarks by the Acting Comptroller General of the United States at the National Defense University on the Department of Defense’s ability to face fiscal challenges, a Heritage Foundation report featuring recommendations for the Pentagon’s Quadrennial Defense Review, a Center for American Progress report analyzing the security threats associated with oil dependence, a RAND Corporation report providing an...

I am looking forward to reading President Obama's National Security Strategy (NSS), which should be released early this year. The NSS is the authoritative account of the president's grand strategy -- how he sees the challenges and opportunities confronting the United States in the world today SNIP The NSS is one of the most important communications tools the president has and, perhaps surprisingly, one of the most important audiences for it is the rest of government. The NSS will tell the vast governmental establishment responsible for implementing the president's vision just exactly what the president's vision is. The NSS is...

It was health care that nationalized the special election for what we now know is the people’s Senate seat. But it was national security that put real distance between Scott Brown and Martha Coakley. “People talk about the potency of the health-care issue,” Brown’s top strategist, Eric Fehrnstrom, told National Review’s Robert Costa, “but from our own internal polling, the more potent issue here in Massachusetts was terrorism and the treatment of enemy combatants.” There is a powerful lesson here for Republicans, and here’s hoping they learn it. One of the great frustrations of the Bush years was the fact...

January 20, 2010, 0:00 a.m. It’s the Enemy, StupidNational-security strength lifts Scott Brown. By Andrew C. McCarthy It was health care that nationalized the special election for what we now know is the people’s Senate seat. But it was national security that put real distance between Scott Brown and Martha Coakley. “People talk about the potency of the health-care issue,” Brown’s top strategist, Eric Fehrnstrom, told National Review’s Robert Costa, “but from our own internal polling, the more potent issue here in Massachusetts was terrorism and the treatment of enemy combatants.” There is a powerful lesson here for Republicans,...

FORT EDWARD — The U.S. should take a more active role in countries such as Yemen and Somalia where al-Qaida is suspected to have training sites in the wake of a failed Christmas Day terrorist attack, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-Hudson, said Friday. “We have to work hard every day on our national security,” she said. “This country is under constant attack. There are still significant gaps in our security strategy. We still haven’t met all the recommendations of the 911 Commission.” While U.S. efforts are focused on Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, al-Qaida has a “mobile network” that isn’t limited to...

WASHINGTON -- There is no doubt that the terrible earthquake in Haiti -- the worst disaster in the history of the Western Hemisphere -- is a tragedy of profound proportions. The good news is that the "first responders" on-scene were wearing American uniforms. The U.S. Coast Guard -- motto: "Semper Paratus" (Latin for "Always Ready") -- was "firstest with the mostest" and began providing emergency assistance within hours of the Tuesday night quake. The White House quickly ordered reinforcements. A veritable armada -- consisting of U.S. Navy ships and aircraft, Air Force cargo and aeromedical flights, a brigade of the...

CNSNews.com is reporting that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), just back from a fact-finding trip to Afghanistan and Pakistan, said he and other senators found operational "confusion" among U.S. military officials on how to handle detained enemy combatants. "From the top to the bottom, the military, the American military people that we talked to, indicated some confusion, operationally, about what you do when you detain a terrorist," McConnell said at a press conference on Tuesday. After pointing out that a U.S. military general declined to answer questions about the handling of insurgent detainees without the presence of his lawyer,...

TOKYO – 2010 marks the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Japan-United States Security Treaty. But, instead of celebrating an agreement that has helped stabilize East Asia for a half-century, the treaty is now at serious risk, as much from indecision as from kneejerk anti-Americanism. In August 2009, Japan’s people voted for “change.” The Liberal Democratic Party, which had ruled Japan for most of the post-war decades, lost parliamentary elections to the Democratic Party of Japan. The key reason for the DPJ’s victory was that voters were fed up with the LDP. That feeling had been growing in the...

Washington and Moscow will restart talks with Washington on a new arms control treaty this month, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Tuesday. “We hope it will happen somewhere in the second half of January,” Lavrov said in televised remarks. However, as I’ve written a few days ago in the New York Times, the negotiations are stuck in the muck. Obama administration has failed to complete the negotiation of a treaty to replace the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START), which expired on Dec. 5. The two superpowers are now in unchartered waters. Moscow and Washington have stated that START still...

The President's Rhetoric on World's Most-Wanted Man Has Changed Considerably Since Campaign. Terrorism and the national security agenda continue to define U.S. foreign policy, as they did during the Bush administration. Yet there is one person who is missing from the language of President Obama and his advisers -- Osama bin Laden, the FBI's most-wanted terrorist. Former President Bush defined his war on terror in light of bin Laden. He famously pronounced in December 2001 that he wanted the al Qaeda mastermind captured "dead or alive." So, too, did Obama when he was running for president. In a debate on...

The Obama administration has failed to complete the negotiation of a treaty to replace the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (Start), which expired on Dec. 5. The two superpowers are now in unchartered waters. Moscow and Washington have stated that Start still applies voluntarily. This is false. First, without the consent of the U.S. Senate, expired treaties are null and void. Second, the Russians already kicked out U.S. inspectors, thus scrapping a key provision of the now-dead treaty. Third, on Tuesday, Dec. 29, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin upped the ante, linking U.S. missile defenses with the treaty signature. Speaking in Vladivostok...

Defense Secretary Robert Gates is on a quest to reform the Pentagon, and nearly everyone is cheering him on. Firing generals, slashing major defense programs and railing against the bureaucracy have given him big approval ratings. Don't look for us in the cheering crowd. We often wind up on opposite sides of key debates. But we share a passion for a strong national defense and a sinking feeling that Gates' quest for military "balance" isn't what it seems. Simply cancelling programs is not reform. The defense budget for fiscal year 2010 has been presented to Congress only in pieces. And...

The writer is a former envoy to the US and the UK, and a former editor of The News. Barack Obama completes his first year as president with his public approval ratings having fallen from a high of 68 per cent when he entered office to 47 per cent. Is this common to American presidents after their first 365 days in power? Does this set a trend line that will persist? Can Obama turn this situation around? The answer to the first two questions is no, not necessarily. The first year certainly sets the momentum and direction for subsequent years,...

Where is Barack Obama’s foreign policy headed? In answering, one must accept a measure of humility. Predicting American policy makes more fools than sages. That goes double for foreign policy, as analysts must anticipate not only the actions of the United States but of foreign provocateurs as well. In the case of Barack Obama, there is an additional caveat: the high-profile concerns that have monopolized his efforts abroad are seen by the president himself as little more than Bush-era loose ends, not the defining transactions of his own foreign policy. All new presidents encounter irritating constraints on their aspirations, but...

I never got around to commenting on President Obama’s statement about the failed Christmas Day bombing, and the subsequent memorandum and review summary about the terrorist attack. First, let me say that it was a very assured speech, the best Obama has been on the subject and the kind of statement I would very much have liked to hear after 9/11. Obama acknowledged that intelligence and security screening cannot possibly react in advance to every potential terrorist attack. And he said pretty clearly that he would not reduce himself or his nation to hysteria in the face of efforts by...

Yemen has posed a concern as a potential terrorist safe haven for some time, and the United States will continue to work with its government to prevent that from happening, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said at the Naval War College here today. Navy Adm. Mike Mullen said the U.S. military has no plan to conduct combat operations in Yemen, nor does the Yemeni government want U.S. combat forces in the country. Rather, he said, the U.S. military will help the Yemeni military with equipment and training. U.S. military officials have been concerned about the country long...

WASHINGTON -- Turns out Hillary Rodham Clinton was right all along. During the nastiest battle of the entire 2008 presidential race, she aired an alarming television commercial warning voters that they would come to regret nominating Barack Obama to occupy the White House. If -- in a national security crisis -- the "red phone" rang at 3 a.m., the ad intoned, Obama would not hear it.

In the wake of the failed Christmas Day airplane bombing and the killing a few days later of seven CIA operatives in Afghanistan, Washington is, as it was after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, obsessed with "dots" -- and our inability to connect them. "The U.S. government had sufficient information to have uncovered this plot and potentially disrupt the Christmas Day attack, but our intelligence community failed to connect those dots," the president said Tuesday. But for all the talk, two key dots have yet to be connected: Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the alleged Northwest Airlines Flight 253 attacker, and Humam...

Stephen Hayes on Napolitano: "It's As If She Hasn't Read a Newspaper in a Decade" SECRETARY NAPOLITANO: I think, following up on that, not just the determination of al Qaeda and al Qaeda Arabian Peninsula, but the tactic of using an individual to foment an attack, as opposed to a large conspiracy or a multi-person conspiracy such as we saw in 9/11, that is something that affects intelligence. It really emphasizes now the renewed importance on how different intelligence is integrated and analyzed, and threat streams are followed through. And, again, it will impact how we continue to

<p>Commission, tells National Review Online that, “frankly, I’m pissed off.”</p> <p>“President Obama just doesn’t get it,” says Lehman. “I don’t think he has a clue. It’s all pure spin. He’s ignoring key issues and taking respectable professionals like John Brennan and turning them into hacks and shills. It’s beyond contempt.”</p>