Defense
Seeking to reduce civilian casualties and collateral damage, the Pentagon will soon deploy a new generation of drones the size of model planes, packing tiny explosive warheads that can be delivered with pinpoint accuracy. – Los Angeles Times
As the fiscal year 2013 defense budget continues to be hashed out on Capitol Hill, the U.S. Army finds itself in a curious position. While the service is putting a positive spin on the fact that it is losing about 80,000 soldiers over the next several years, leadership is pushing away more funding for tanks and heavy armor that the service says it neither wants nor needs. – Defense News
A pair of Senate defense hearings scheduled for this week will likely close out the congressional hearing season for the Pentagon’s fiscal 2013 spending proposal. – DEFCON Hill
House Republicans are demanding an explanation from President Obama for the “morally unconscionable” decision to toss war funding into the pool of automatic budget cuts facing the Pentagon. – DEFCON Hill
Air Force Gen. Norton Schwartz, nearing the end of his 40-year career, hit back aggressively [yesterday] at a series of congressional moves to obstruct the promotion of top Air Force leaders, including Schwartz’s successor as Chief of Staff, and to undo what the service believes are essential force structure changes. – AOL Defense
An impressively large hangar is rising here to house a familiar-looking, yet in some respects revolutionary, version of a drone Northrop Grumman Corp. is to unveil to the world this Thursday. – AOL Defense
Dov Zakheim writes: More than any other economic danger looming on America’s immediate horizon, including a possible break-up of the eurozone, sequestration poses the greatest single threat to American recovery in the near term. – Shadow Government
Intelligence
CIA Director David Petraeus, who won praise as the Army’s out-of-the-box theorist, is quietly reshaping the CIA toward covert paramilitary operations, and some agency hands say the continued military focus is limiting efforts to improve CIA spies’ mission of stealing secrets. – Washington Free Beacon
The War
The Supreme Court on Monday refused to hear appeals from seven men held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, passing up an opportunity to clarify its last Guantánamo decision, in 2008. That ruling, in Boumediene v. Bush, gave prisoners at Guantánamo a “meaningful opportunity” to challenge their detentions in court. – New York Times
Foreign Aid
The leading Republican champion of foreign aid on Monday expressed concern that U.S. funding is increasingly going toward climate change programs. – The Hill’s Global Affairs
