Defense
Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said the reshaping of the defense budget would leave the U.S. in position to simultaneously fight a land war with North Korea and prevent Iran from closing the Strait of Hormuz, if necessary, despite deep cuts in conventional forces. – Wall Street Journal (subscription required)
Resources: Read the transcript of the briefing with Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey, the transcript of the briefing with Deputy Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter and Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. James Winnefeld, the Department’s white paper Defense Budget Priorities and Choices, and a budget fact sheet.
Army Chief of Staff Gen Odierno’s remarks at AUSA’s Land Warfare Institute outlining five priorities and the Army’s three roles
Senate Armed Services Chairman Carl Levin (D-Mich.) said that the threat of $500 billion in automatic cuts to defense spending will force Republicans to drop their opposition to including tax hikes to finance deficit reduction. – DEFCON Hill
Defense firms working on the Humvee upgrade effort are setting their sights on the Marines after Pentagon officials killed the Army-led program, industry sources say. – AOL Defense
President Obama has forged a special connection with the elite Navy SEALs unit responsible for some of the most prominent military operations of his presidency. – USA Today
U.S. officials say the Pentagon and the White House have embraced a proposal by special operations chief Adm. Bill McRaven to send troops that are withdrawing from war zones to reinforce special operations units in areas somewhat neglected during the decade-long focus on al-Qaida. – Associated Press
Fred Kagan writes: The question is not whether the United States will again send troops to fight in far-off lands. The question that should weigh most heavily on Congress as it considers the defense budget is what kind of leaders those troops will have and how well prepared they will be. – Washington Post
Mackenzie Eaglen writes: It has become a truism to suggest that decline is a choice, but it is indeed. When a superpower becomes complacent and stops seeking to innovate, it sacrifices the initiative to other hungrier powers. It’s true in business and it’s true in war. Innovate or die. It’s time to allow the U.S. military to innovate again at long last. – American Enterprise Institute
Eaglen also writes: Make no mistake: as defense budgets go down, so does America’s capacity to give its men and women in uniform the tools they need to defend our interests abroad—as well as our ability to renew our defense industrial base. The military deserves better than this budget, and so does America. – The Enterprise Blog
Max Boot writes: It appears, ironically, the Obama administration is being seduced by the same techno-utopian vision that entranced Rumsfeld–of doing more with less. The fault in that line of thinking was displayed in Iraq and Afghanistan, where we quickly found out there was no substitute for a humble rifleman to impose our will on the enemy at bayonet point. Now the Obama administration is fooling itself into thinking we will never have to fight another major ground war again. That is a myth we have fallen prey to many times before–only to have a painful disabusing. You would think we would have learned our lesson. Apparently not. – Commentary Magazine’s Contentions
Missile Defense
NATO has made little progress on missile defense cooperation with Russia, possibly jeopardizing a planned summit in May, said NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen. – Defense News
The War
The United States has slapped terrorist designations on two members of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) and one member of Uzbekistan’s Islamic Jihad Union (IJU), prohibiting U.S. transactions with the men and freezing of all of their U.S. property and interests in property. – Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
They kill without warning, are comparatively cheap, risk no American lives, and produce triumphant headlines. Over the last three years, drone strikes have quietly become the Obama administration’s weapon of choice against terrorists. – Reuters
David Bell writes: What the history of war makes clear is that the administration’s embrace of “remote control warfare” does not signal an abolition of restraints on war’s destructive power. Using technology to strike safely at an opponent is as old as war itself. It has been seen in eras of highly-controlled and restrained warfare, and in eras of unrestrained total war—and the present day, thankfully, belongs to the first category. Ultimately, restraints upon war are more a matter of politics than of technology. If you are concerned about American aggression, it is not the drones you should fear, but the politicians who order them into battle. – The New Republic
Intelligence
The nation’s intelligence chief says it will take five years to complete major improvements in the system that allows U.S. agencies to share secret information, after the WikiLeaks breach revealed embarrassing weaknesses in the system. – Washington Times
