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China's navy commissioned 17 new warships last year, the most of any nation. In a little more than a decade, it's expected to have three aircraft carriers, giving it more clout than ever in a region of contested seas and festering territorial disputes. Those numbers testify to huge increases in defense spending that have endowed China with the largest military budget behind the United States and fueled an increasingly large and sophisticated defense industry. While Beijing still lags far behind the U.S. in both funding and technology, its spending boom is attracting new scrutiny at a time of severe cuts...

The latest news to come out of Ukraine doesn’t involve Vice President Joe Biden, European natural gas supplies, or Vladimir Putin’s insatiable appetite for the resurrection of the Soviet Union. In fact, it hits a bit closer to home. America’s spy satellites, as it turns out, is dependent upon Russian provided technology to reach orbit. That’s right… Not only are our astronauts hitching rides to the Russian-run “international” space station, but even our spy satellites have to hitch a ride via Putin’s Russian Military industrial complex. And any sanctions that could come out of the situation in Ukraine, may just...

Slavyansk (Ukraine) (AFP) - Pro-Kremlin rebels in Ukraine braced Wednesday for a renewed military offensive by Kiev as US troops headed to region in a show of force after Washington again warned Moscow over the escalating crisis. The United States said it plans to deploy 600 troops to Poland and the Baltic states to "reassure our allies and partners" after threatening Russia with more sanctions. Ukraine's acting president Oleksandr Turchynov late Tuesday ordered a new "anti-terrorist" operation against separatists holding a string of eastern towns after the discovery of two "brutally tortured" bodies. One of the dead was a local...

With literacy rates among high school graduates ever more of a mystery, educators are worried about…defense spending on education. Never mind that the Department of Defense is one of the few federal agencies experiencing funding cutbacks, anti-military teachers are worried about what is left of the Pentagon’s budget. “In 2010, the most recent year for which data are available, the Department of Defense (DoD) was administering more than a dozen different programs and spending close to $50 million on K-12 outreach targeting the STEM fields of science, technology, engineering, and math,” Seth Kershner writes in Rethinking Schools, “a nonprofit publisher...

An Egyptian cleric defended the Sept. 11 attacks in a broadcast interview, saying it left Muslims and non-Muslims around the world happy, according to a tape played for the jury at his terrorism trial on Monday. Mustafa Kamel Mustafa could be heard casually speaking of the attacks in the undated interview with a Canadian broadcaster, even equating what al-Qaida did to the hero in American movies. “Everybody was happy when the planes hit the World Trade Center,” Mustafa said in the interview. “Anybody who tell you he was not happy, they are hypocrites.” …

After the 9/11 attacks, tens of thousands of young men and women joined the military, heading for the rugged mountains of Afghanistan and dusty deserts of Iraq. Many of them now are officers in the Army with multiple combat deployments under their belts. But as the wars wind down and Pentagon budgets shrink, a lot of them are being told they have to leave. […] Already down to about 522,000, the Army must shrink to 490,000 by October 2015, and then to 450,000 two years later. If automatic budget cuts resume, the Army will have to get down to 420,000—a...

This is weird. This was posted April 4 on the Diego Garcia Passenger Facebook Page. Via RedFlagNews:Malaysian news reported MH370 Captain Zaharie Shah’s homemade flight simulator had five runways programmed into the system.The runways included:** Three airports in India and Sri Lanka** One airport in Maldives** One US military base in Diego GarciaThe Malaysian pilot on missing flight MH370 was reportedly a political fanatic who attended the trial of the country’s opposition leader hours before the flight.The Daily Mail reported:

In the skies above Yemen, the Pentagon’s armed drones have stopped flying, a result of the ban on American military drone strikes imposed by the government there after a number of botched operations in recent years killed Yemeni civilians. But the Central Intelligence Agency’s drone war in Yemen continues. In Pakistan, the C.I.A. remains in charge of drone operations, and may continue to be long after American troops have left Afghanistan. And in Jordan, it is the C.I.A. rather than the Pentagon that is running a program to arm and train Syrian rebels — a concession to the Jordanian government,...

The proposed move will take the Pentagon from the banks of the Potomac River to northwest Kansas. WASHINGTON (April 1, 2010) -- Top Army officials unveiled plans early today to relocate the massive Pentagon building to the western part of Kansas sometime this summer. "This move will be a huge undertaking, but we determined it was a necessary step as we realign our force structure," said one of the Army's top generals. "Once we started investigating the possibility of the move, we determined that it was not only critical to our efforts, but that it would be good for our...

The contempt with which Vladimir Putin holds President Obama and his entire foreign policy team fairly oozes out of the Kremlin. Josh Rogin of the Daily Beast noted "sarcasm and derision from Russia’s Twitter-happy deputy prime minister Dmitry Rogozi," including a Tweet mocking "Comrade @BarackObama." Putin's speech yesterday was full of venom towards the U.S., as have been most Russian media outlets. But the key detail is how Putin played Obama, as the Wall Street Journal noted this morning: Mr. Obama in four phone calls with Mr. Putin over the past month totaling 4½ hours also failed to make headway...

Manifestly the Pentagon never received the memo that Islam is at war with Western Civilization. Or, that Islam is a brutally misogynistic ideology bent on the wholesale murder of women who dare show a little ankle. Oh, and did I forget to mention that its founder, Mohammed–had an unquenchable penchant for little girls? In short: Islam is evil. With that established–allow me to enlighten you as to what insanity our Pentagon is currently engaged in. The Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) just announced that it will be providing our military with chaplains for active-duty service. That’s right–our Pentagon is...

Yes, government waste, fraud and abuse are the triplet children of incompetence, greed and unbridled ambition. But these sins of public trust begin and end with dishonesty. And Joseph E. Schmitz has seen a lot of lying by the government to taxpayers in his lengthy legal career. Schmitz, who served as inspector general of the U.S. Department of Defense from 2002-05, in an interview with Watchdog.org said, “no political party has a monopoly on waste, fraud and abuse and corruption.” But he said he has seen some troubling patterns of deceit in the Obama administration. Exhibit A, according to the...

When the time comes and we wake up one morning and this country's command centers, political, military, governmental, has been taken over by those who seek to destroy us all, you won't be able to say, you didn't know, you weren't warned, you didn't have the means to prevent it from happening. At the beginning, at every beginning, thoughts that seem too surreal to ever have you believe it could ever happen eventually gnaw at you from inside your brain, where familiarity breeds contempt and all those too surreal to be real scenarios come true, it will have been too...

“In the military mind set, the “drug war” has moved from metaphor to real life, with American streets as the “front,” American citizens as the “enemy” and law enforcement officers as the warriors. At the direction of Congress, the Pentagon has spent the past 20 years providing military hardware free of charge to police departments throughout the nation, all for the stated purpose of fighting the War on Drugs. Billions of dollars worth of “surplus” military grade equipment has been transferred, literally enabling law enforcement in towns both large and small to serve warrants, control crowds and “keep the peace”...

ST. LOUIS, MO (KTVI) – We may soon see military in armored trucks roaming our city streets. An estimated 13,000 mine-resistant vehicles are expected to be distributed around the country.

Benefits for active ­duty personnel and their families would be slashed under a budget proposal released Monday by the Pentagon. The budget would dramatically reduce the Army’s size and trigger a new round of controversial base closures, while cutting healthcare co-pays and deductibles and reducing the subsidies military families get for housing and low-cost goods. Defense Sec. Chuck Hagel acknowledged the cuts would be controversial, but argued they were unavoidable in a belt-tightening era following the end of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. “Congress has taken some important steps in recent years to control the growth in compensation spending, but...

WASHINGTON — Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel plans to shrink the United States Army to its smallest force since before the World War II buildup and eliminate an entire class of Air Force attack jets in a new spending proposal that officials describe as the first Pentagon budget to aggressively push the military off the war footing adopted after the terror attacks of 2001. The proposal, described by several Pentagon officials on the condition of anonymity in advance of its release on Monday, takes into account the fiscal reality of government austerity and the political reality of a president who pledged...

The U.S. Defense Department plans to buy eight fewer F-35 fighter jets in fiscal 2015, according to a news report.The Pentagon will request funding for 34 of the aircraft in the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1, including 26 of the Air Force’s conventional model, six of the Marine Corps’ vertical-landing version, and two of the Navy’s aircraft carrier variant, according to an article by Tony Capaccio of Bloomberg News.That’s down from 42 planes the department previously projected it would buy during the period, but up from the 29 aircraft it’s buying this year, it stated. The Defense Department’s base budget,...

Grover Norquist, who founded Americans for Tax Reform (ATR)... his connections to Muslim Brotherhood groups and individuals in the U.S. is irrefutable. One such individual is Abdurahman Alamoudi. Another is Suhail Khan, whose father helped found the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) and the Muslim Students Association (MSA). His mother sat on the board of a Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) chapter... Norquist helped Khan become the White House gatekeeper relative to selecting Muslim leaders who the Bush administration partnered with before and after 9/11. Those Muslim leaders belonged to Muslim Brotherhood front groups. ... Last year it was...

The U.S. Defense Department said on Monday that Iranian warships are allowed to sail into the Atlantic Ocean so long as “they understand the responsibilities” of cruising so close to the U.S. border. The Pentagon’s pronouncement comes just days after Iran announced that warships were approaching the U.S. maritime border in response to America’s naval presence in the Persian Gulf. Asked to respond to Iran’s pointed military rhetoric, Pentagon spokesman Bill Speaks told the Washington Free Beacon that it would not be an issue for Iranian ships to enter the Atlantic. “Freedom of the seas applies to all maritime nations,...

Islamofascism: Caving to pressure from Muslim groups, the Pentagon has relaxed uniform rules to allow Islamic beards, turbans and hijabs. It's a major win for political correctness and a big loss for military unit cohesion. Also, the sharia-compliant regulation threatens to expand the jihadi Fifth Column that counterintelligence already is dealing with in the wake of the Fort Hood massacre. The FBI is tracking more than 100 suspected jihadists within the military. Making special accommodations for Islam will only attract more Muslims into the military at a time when two recent terror cases highlight the ongoing danger of Muslims in...

The Defense Department is discussing a $1 billion cut over the next three years to the commissary’s budget in a move that could lead to a widespread closure of stores, Pentagon and industry officials said. Word of the pending cut comes two months after news that the Pentagon’s top financial advisor ordered the Defense Commissary Agency (DeCA) to produce a plan to close most stateside commissaries should the need arise. The commissary agency currently operates 247 stores worldwide. Under the requested closure plan, all but 24 rural stores stateside and stores located outside the continental U.S. would close.

THE PENTAGON -- The Pentagon has discovered a gap in the defenses of Washington, D.C., and it's about to test a solution. But depending on your point of view, the solution is either vital for national security or a threat to American privacy.

The Pentagon will become more accommodating to individuals’ respective religions, according to updated instruction released today. A new Pentagon policy states that military departments will accommodate religious requests from individual service members unless a request would interfere with military readiness, a mission, unit cohesion, or good order and discipline. This would include religious clothing, facial hair, religious tattoos and piercings. The changes come after a Sikh American Army major complained to congressional staffers that fellow Sikhs should be able to wear a turban or maintain a beard while in uniform. Each request will be decided on a case-by-case basis, and...

The Pentagon on Wednesday relaxed its rules governing the religious apparel and facial hair that troops can wear or maintain while in uniform, permitting in some cases tattoos, body piercings and other religious items. The Defense Department issued the changes via a directive Wednesday afternoon. As part of the military's changing approach to making religious accommodations, the new policy will allow service members to sport different kinds of religious garb and hairstyles so long as they don't have an "adverse effect on military readiness, mission accomplishment, unit cohesion, and good order and discipline." The changes create several new categories, besides...

The Pentagon on Wednesday relaxed its rules governing the religious apparel and facial hair that troops can wear or maintain while in uniform, permitting in some cases tattoos, body piercings and other religious items.  The Defense Department issued the changes via a directive Wednesday afternoon. As part of the military's changing approach to making religious accommodations, the new policy will allow service members to sport different kinds of religious garb and hairstyles so long as they don't have an "adverse effect on military readiness, mission accomplishment, unit cohesion, and good order and discipline."  The changes create several new categories, besides...

With the 50th anniversary of the JFK assassination this past November, I began revisiting the various conspiracy theories that have appeared over the years. I never put any stock in the Warren Commission and the establishment verdict of “Oswald as lone killer.” But among all the conspiracy portrayals put forth, none truly satisfied me as definitive. That is until I read JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters, by James W. Douglass. There are hundreds of “JFK conspiracy” books in print, but Douglass takes the reader to places not visited by others eloquently and hauntingly. And...

War On Terror: By refusing to acknowledge the role of al-Qaida-linked terrorists in the Benghazi attack, the administration has kept our military from hunting down and killing people responsible for the deadly 2012 attack. There would seem to be no shortage of targets for America's fleet of drones after the Senate release of a report documenting, despite the efforts of the New York Times and others to revive the video lie, the presence and participation of terrorists from no fewer than four al-Qaida-affiliated groups on the ground in Benghazi. Among the al-Qaida-affiliated groups involved in the Sept. 11, 2012, terrorist...

The Office of the Secretary of Defense has instructed the Navy to reduce its planned buy of the new Littoral Combat Ship from 52 to 32 ships, substantially limiting the size and scope of the emerging multi-mission, shallow-water ship program, according to reports. Defense News cites a Jan. 6 memo from Acting Deputy Defense Secretary Christine Fox account announcing the decision pointing to budget guidance from the White House on some large acquisition decisions. Pentagon and Navy officials would not comment on the memo or the acquisition decision regarding LCS fleet size, citing budget deliberations as pre-decisional. “We continue to...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Pentagon repeatedly waived laws banning Chinese-built components on U.S. weapons in order to keep the $392 billion Lockheed Martin Corp F-35 fighter program on track in 2012 and 2013, even as U.S. officials were voicing concern about China's espionage and military buildup. According to Pentagon documents reviewed by Reuters, chief U.S. arms buyer Frank Kendall allowed two F-35 suppliers, Northrop Grumman Corp and Honeywell International Inc, to use Chinese magnets for the new warplane's radar system, landing gears and other hardware. Without the waivers, both companies could have faced sanctions for violating federal law and the...

US President Barack Obama has signed a bill hindering the construction of GLONASS stations on the US territory. The document rules that the matter requires the Secretary of Defense and the Director of National Intelligence to report the case to Congress first. Under the Republican-proposed bill, the Pentagon and CIA chiefs are to provide assurances that GLONASS stations will not be used for spying against the US or for improving the efficiency of Russian weapons, the New York Times says. The signing was preceded by protracted debates between various US agencies and departments. The bill reflects their authors’ suspicions towards...

Cards on the table: Obama Inc. is not only a criminal enterprise, but a regime gone completely wild. No amount of lipstick on a pig will change said ugly truths. Therefore, when enemies supplant friends and patriots become foes, the first targets of anti-American leadership are its front line defense – its armed forces! Why? Because without their forward arm there is no defense of the homeland. As such, doesn’t it make sense that anti-American leadership would target them first, in effect, making sure that demoralizing the troops is a priority? In tandem, U.S. military downsizing tops their list of...

China’s military forces are showing no signs of increased alert status or readiness for conflict despite high tensions with Japan over Beijing’s air defense zone overlapping U.S. and Japanese air defense coverage of the disputed Senkaku islands. A senior defense official said U.S. military monitors observed “no unusual military movements” by the Chinese military since the Nov. 23 declaration of the air defense identification zone, which the Pentagon has called “destabilizing.” Imposition of the new air defense zone has sharply increased tensions in East Asia. China has scrambled jets to patrol airspace that includes the Senkakus, which China is claiming....

<p>It must be understood, the Pentagon, under the reign of Barack HUSSEIN Obama, is less of a forward arm for America’s defense than a helpmate to its enemies. There you have it.</p>

China’s military imposed a destabilizing air defense zone over the East China Sea without consulting the United States, and top Pentagon leaders said Wednesday there have been no contacts with their Chinese counterparts since the zone was set up Nov. 23. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at a press conference at the Pentagon that the Chinese air zone is destabilizing the region. However, both leaders declined to urge China to roll back the air defense identification zone, or ADIZ, as Japan’s government has demanded of the Chinese. The lack...

Big-ticket weapons like aircraft carriers and the F-35 fighter jet have to be part of any conversation about cutting Pentagon spending to satisfy the mandatory budget reductions known as the sequester. But compensation for military personnel has to be on the table, too — even though no other defense issue is more politically volatile or emotionally fraught. After a decade of war, the very idea of cutting benefits to soldiers, sailors and Marines who put their lives on the line seems ungrateful. But America’s involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan is over or winding down, and the Pentagon is obliged to...

For two decades, the U.S. military has been unable to submit to an audit, flouting federal law and concealing waste and fraud totaling billions of dollarsLinda Woodford spent the last 15 years of her career inserting phony numbers in the U.S. Department of Defense’s accounts. Every month until she retired in 2011, she says, the day came when the Navy would start dumping numbers on the Cleveland, Ohio, office of the Defense Finance and Accounting Service, the Pentagon’s main accounting agency. Using the data they received, Woodford and her fellow DFAS accountants there set about preparing monthly reports to square...

Political Correctness: A healthy, white, heterosexual, Christian man has unfair advantages in the U.S. military over other soldiers, says a training manual approved by the Pentagon, warning in great detail about a so-called White Male Club. Those who thought the U.S. military was already the ultimate level playing field, a place where skill and fighting ability were what mattered, not gender, race or religious belief, were sadly mistaken, at least according to a 600-plus-page manual used by the military to train its Equal Opportunity officers. According to the manual, put together by the Defense Equal Opportunity Management Institute (DEOMI), and...

<p>The number of sexual assaults reported in the military saw a double-digit surge over the last year — but that doesn’t necessarily mean that members are suffering more attacks, the Pentagon said, in its latest report.</p> <p>Instead, most of the 46 percent hike can be attributed to “victim confidence in our response system,” the Pentagon made clear, United Press International reported.</p>

The military must prepare for major upheaval, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel said Tuesday, because meeting the budgetary and security challenges of the future will “require significant change across every aspect of our defense enterprise.” And deep cuts in end strength could be just one of the results. (snip) “We may have to accept the reality that not every unit will be at maximum readiness, and some kind of a tiered readiness system is perhaps inevitable,” Hagel said. “This carries the risk that the President would have fewer options to fulfill our national security objectives.” (snip) “We will need to...

Senior military officials are leaning towards removing the National Security Agency director’s authority over U.S. Cyber Command, according to a former high-ranking administration official familiar with internal discussions. Keith Alexander, a four star general who leads both NSA and Cyber Command, plans to step down in the spring. No formal decision has been made yet, but the Pentagon has already drawn up a list of possible civilian candidates for the next NSA director, the former official told The Hill. A separate military officer would head up Cyber Command, a team of military hackers that trains for offensive cyber attacks and...

Doctors say a number of military personnel are turning to liposuction to remove excess fat from around the waist so they can pass the Pentagon’s body fat test. Some service members say they have no other choice because the Defense Department’s method of estimating body fat is weeding out not just flabby physiques but bulkier, muscular builds. …

The U.S. Army has appeared to do an about-face on some derogatory information recently released about the Christian conservative American Family Association (AFA). Fox News reported that in early October dozens of active duty and reserve Army troops were informed during a briefing at Camp Shelby in Mississippi that the respected pro-family organization should be classified as a hate group. According to Fox, during a slide presentation at the briefing the AFA was listed “alongside domestic hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan, Neo-Nazis, the Black Panthers, and the Nation of Islam.” But after the story about the misinformation gained...

Video at link: The Air Force’s two star general in charge of the units responsible for its 450 nuclear missiles has been fired “due to a loss of trust and confidence in his leadership and judgment.” Maj. Gen. Michael Carey has been removed from command of the 20th Air Force, according to an Air Force statement. That command is responsible for the three wings that maintain control of the 450 intercontinental ballistic missiles scattered in missile silos across the northern plains. Lt. Gen. James Kowalski, the commander of Air Force Global Strike Command, made the decision because of what the...

Last week I wrote a column accusing the president of having a vindictive streak -- of deliberately trying to make the lives of average Americans worse just so he could score ideological and political points. We already knew from how he handled the budget sequester that Obama liked this approach. He ordered Cabinet secretaries not to do their jobs -- i.e., to manage as best they could under spending restraints -- but instead to find ways to make the cuts needlessly painful for innocents caught in the Beltway crossfire. They dusted off the same playbook for the shutdown. As one...

Fisher House Foundation has stepped in and offered an advance grant to families of the fallen during the government shutdown, “to ensure there is no funding gap during the most difficult of times, with the understanding that reimbursements would be made at an appropriate time.” The Pentagon has said it cannot pay death benefits to families of troops killed in Afghanistan. ... Fisher House is a charity established to help troops and families in need.

At least five families of U.S. military members killed during in Afghanistan over the weekend were given a double-whammy by federal officials: Not only have your loved ones died, but due to the government shutdown, you won’t receive a death benefit. The benefit is $100,000 and is wired to family members of the killed military member within 36 hours of the death. The so-called “death gratuity” is aimed at paying for funeral costs and to help with those living expenses normally covered by the soldier’s paycheck. They serve as a transition pay benefit until the military’s survivor benefits begin. The...

The Pentagon is ordering most of its approximately 400,000 furloughed civilian employees back to work. The decision by Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel is based on a Pentagon legal interpretation of a law called the Pay Our Military Act. That measure was passed by Congress and signed by President Barack Obama shortly before the partial government shutdown began Tuesday. The law ensured that members of the military, who have remained at work throughout the shutdown, would be paid on time. It also left room for the Pentagon to keep on the job those civilians who provide support to the military.

Nothing further yet

<p>SEOUL, South Korea - Pentagon and administration lawyers are looking for ways to expand the number of Defense Department civilians who are exempt from furloughs, amid worries that the government shutdown is damaging U.S. credibility among its international allies, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said Tuesday.</p>