Free Republic

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...