Free Republic

Former speaker of the House Newt Gingrich said Wednesday that he would like to “turn the Pentagon into a triangle.” “I always tell people I’m a hawk,” Gingrich said. “But I’m a cheap hawk.” Gingrich honored the 20th anniversary of his “Contract with America” by pointing conservatives back to a key point in his Republican blueprint, arguing that federal bureaucracy cannot simply be “fixed” but must be overhauled and replaced. The Pentagon, Gingrich stressed, must be included in this overhaul.

One thing that you can say for ISIS, the Middle-East terrorist army, is that it doesn’t have a recruitment problem. Young men are streaming to Syria and Iraq from all over the world to join the cause. And they come not just from the Muslim world, but also from England, France, Sweden, Australia, and the U.S.Perhaps hoping to put a dent in the appeal of ISIS, some Western newspapers have made much of the expensive stolen watch visible on the wrist of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi during his first public appearance at the Grand Mosque in Mosul. According to...

The Pentagon recently notified members of Congress that it intends to transfer six low-level detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to Uruguay soon, including a Syrian man who is legally challenging the manner in which the military force-feeds some prisoners, U.S. officials said Wednesday. The men — four Syrians, a Palestinian and a Tunisian — are among the more than 70 detainees who have long been cleared for release from the U.S. detention facility because they are not deemed an ongoing threat. The move would mark a significant step in the Obama administration’s long-stymied quest to shut down Guantanamo Bay, where...

In a callous and unreasonable act of complete disregard for our military, Obama’s Defense Department has sent pink slips to military officers serving on the battlefield in Afghanistan. This reminds one of the treatment of victims of Nadal Hassan in Ft. Hood, but it gets even more intriguing. While this is going on, the Pentagon and the military are looking to keep and employ more Muslims. According to a report by the World Tribune, officials said the ‘Defense Department has been keeping records and tracking Muslims so they can encourage their presence and continued advancement in the military.’

On Monday, the White House memo used to justify drone attacks on U.S. citizens was released, and it appears to confirm the worst suspicions of its libertarian critics. The Obama administration had sought to keep the memo secret, and now we know why: Because there are no checks and balances; there are no classified courts. Indeed, the memo reveals that the president of the United States ordered the targeting killing of U.S. citizens overseas — in violation of their constitutional right to due process — sans any type of oversight outside of the executive.

The Department of Defense has disbursed some funds to universities so that scientists might study the dynamics of civil unrest — and how the U.S. military might best respond. It’s called the “Minerva Research Initiative,” and it’s a program that was kicked off in 2008 to “improve DoD’s basic understanding of the social, cultural, behavioral and political forces that shape regions of the world of strategic importance to the U.S.,” The Guardian reported. ~snip~ Those individuals targeted for questioning include political activists and members of non-governmental organizations — something that The Guardian pointed to as potential for concern. ~end snip~

"Last year, the DoD's Minerva Initiative funded a project to determine 'Who Does Not Become a Terrorist, and Why?' which, however, conflates peaceful activists with "supporters of political violence" who are different from terrorists only in that they do not embark on "armed militancy" themselves."

Tom Slear, who retired from the Army as a lieutenant colonel in 2001, is a freelance writer in Annapolis. A few weeks ago, I mentioned to a receptionist in a physical therapist’s office that I was covered by Tricare, the military’s health-care program for service members, retirees and their families. (It has nothing to do with the troubled Veterans Affairs hospital system.) “Good deal,” I said. “You deserve it,” she responded. Really? If she only knew. Though I spent more than five years on active duty during the 1970s as an Army infantry officer and an additional 23 years in...

While many focus their disgust for the federal government towards the occupants housed in the IRS, DoJ, VA, and 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, this latest deserter-for-Taliban trade puts the spotlight on another particular building. ... It was the late Army Colonel David Hackworth who bestowed the title of “perfumed princes” on senior military leaders who stood not for the men and women in uniform but rather for their own career advancement. As we live through the decimation of our armed forces it’s difficult to say Vaughn doesn’t have a point. Vaughn believes “There is no way that the White House could...

That lukewarm reception Barack Obama received at West Point last week was indicative of the widely held view among the troops that the man is a truly incompetent commander in chief, or as the language-mangling Al Sharpton might say, “the Commander of the Chiefs.” Notice that I said the troops, not their senior leadership. If our Pentagon weren’t currently occupied by the perfumed princes of political correctness, we might be seeing some courageous generals and admirals falling on their swords and exposing this failure of leadership instead of enabling it. Those ambitious cowards should ponder the reality that neither “I...

To pull off the prisoner swap of five Taliban leaders for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, the White House overrode an existing interagency process charged with debating the transfer of Guantanamo Bay prisoners and dismissed long-standing Pentagon and intelligence community concerns based on Top Secret intelligence about the dangers of releasing the five men, sources familiar with the debate tell TIME. National Security Council officials at the White House decline to describe the work of the ad hoc process they established to trade the prisoners, or to detail the measures they have taken to limit the threat the Taliban officials may pose....

A White House veto threat — reiterated just hours before the vote — had little impact in an election year as lawmakers embraced the popular measure that includes a 1.8 percent pay raise for the troops and adds up to hundreds of thousands of jobs back home. The vote was 325-98 for the legislation, with 216 Republicans and 109 Democrats backing the bill. The National Defense Authorization Act calls for the addition of $175 million in funding for the Iron Dome system, which currently gets $176 million annually from the Pentagon. Much of the funding would be tied to a...

Pentagon is weighing allowing some immigrants brought illegally to the country as youths to serve in the military, a unilateral step by the Obama administration as immigration legislation remains stalled in the Republican-led House. The announcement came Tuesday as House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, defended his election-year decision to rebuff a narrow immigration measure pushed by a GOP congressman to achieve a similar goal. The Pentagon consideration would apply to immigrants who arrived illegally as kids but already have received work permits and relief from deportation under a program President Barack Obama announced two years ago, called Deferred Action for...

Shame on Chuck Hagel, Barack Obama and Eric Shinseki. While honorably discharged veterans are dying from neglect in Veteran’s Administration hospitals, the Regime response is a sex change for Bradley Manning and new furniture for Veteran’s Administration headquarters. Last week, quisling Chuck Hagel spit in the face of sick and injured veterans throughout the country. In an insult to all of America’s veterans, Hagel has approved sending the traitorous Army Private Bradley Manning, now known as “Chelsea Manning,” to a civilian prison that will see that he gets a sex change operation. Manning was convicted of stealing and distributing classified...

CHINA’S top general blamed the Obama administration’s new focus on Asia for various disputes in the East and South China seas, claiming that “some neighboring countries” were using it as a chance to provoke problems. Speaking to reporters at the Pentagon on Thursday, the People’s Liberation Army’s Chief of the General Staff General Fang Fenghui also warned that the US must be objective about tensions between China and Vietnam or risk harming relations between Washington and Beijing. He defended China’s deployment of an oil rig in the South China Sea and said China had no intention of abandoning drilling despite...

The Department of Defense was put in the awkward position of having to defend cuts to military pay raises and housing allowances as well as increasing health care fees just one day before a report saying the Pentagon spent $150 a gallon on green jet fuels. Defense officials spent $150 on jet fuel made from algae that is approved for civilian and military use, according to a report released Wednesday by the Government Accountability Office. […] HEFA, or Hydroprocessed Esters and Fatty Acids, comes from “renewable oil (e.g., vegetable oils, animal fat, waste grease, and algae oil) … processed using...

The Department of Defense (DOD) paid $150 per gallon for alternative jet fuel made from algae, more than 64 times the current market price for standard carbon-based fuels, according to a report released on Wednesday. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) noted in its report that a Pentagon official reported paying “about $150 per gallon for 1,500 gallons of alternative jet fuel derived from algal oil.” GAO’s report examined the financial challenges facing increased purchases and use of alternative jet fuels by federal agencies. “Currently, the price for alternative jet fuels exceeds that of conventional jet fuel,” the report noted. The...

The Pentagon posted a narrow win Wednesday as a House panel endorsed leaving the authority to prosecute rapes and other serious crimes with military commanders. In an emotionally charged debate, the House Armed Services Committee rejected a measure that would have stripped the long-standing authority to decide whether to pursue a case, especially those related to sexual assault, and hand the job to seasoned military lawyers. The vote was 34-28. …

The agency that manages the Pentagon Police Department and also runs networks and computers for the Office of the Secretary of Defense experienced a “catastrophic network technological outage” on Jan. 3, and repairs may not be complete until January 2015, an obscure document on the Federal Business Opportunities website revealed. A Defense Department spokesman attributed the outage to the failure of a legacy component. The contracting document, posted on May 2, said the outage experienced by the Pentagon Life Safety System Network and Life Safety Backbone left the Pentagon Force Protection Agency “without access to the mission-critical systems needed to...

The top two officials at the Defense Intelligence Agency said Wednesday that they will retire from those positions in the coming months, part of a leadership shake-up at an agency that is under pressure to trim budgets and shift focus after more than a decade of war, current and former U.S. officials said. Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn is expected to end his tenure as DIA director this summer, about a year before he was scheduled to depart, according to officials who said Flynn faced pressure from Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. and others in recent months....

The Pentagon says Russia’s defense chief has assured Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel that Russia will not invade Ukraine. […] Hagel also asked for Russia’s help in gaining the release of seven inspectors from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, who are being held in eastern Ukraine by pro-Russian separatists. …

The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter - the jet that the Pentagon is counting on to be the stealthy future of its tactical aircraft - is having all sorts of shortcomings. But the most serious may be that the JSF is not, in fact, stealthy in the eyes of a growing number of Russian and Chinese radars. Nor it is particularly good at jamming enemy radar. Which means the Defense Department is committing hundreds of billions of dollars to a fighter that will need the help of specialized jamming aircraft that protect non-stealthy - "radar-shiny," as some insiders call them -...

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...