Defense
After months of dire talk about $1 trillion in cuts to the Pentagon over the next decade if the sequester takes effect, and all the high-minded talk of zero cuts from hawks, defense is going to take another hit regardless of who’s in the White House next year. As that realization begins to sink in, critical lawmakers are already starting to play an old-fashioned game of horse trading. – Politico
The general tapped to head the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter effort called the relationship between contractor Lockheed Martin and the program office “the worst I have ever seen,” expressing frustration with the company’s continued performance and production woes. – Defense News
As the Defense Department pieces together its budget blueprint for the upcoming fiscal year, Pentagon number crunchers will not factor the potential sequestration fallout into their analysis. – DEFCON Hill
Two former top officials in the Pentagon slammed Washington on Monday for its inability to grapple with the budget and debt problems facing the country, calling on “adults” to come back to Washington after the election in order to compromise. – DEFCON Hill
Another continuing resolution (CR) will keep funding most of the government’s operations, but the six-month stopgap measure passed by the House on Sept. 13 could leave some of the U.S. Navy’s shipbuilding programs high and dry. – Defense News
The new amphibious transport dock ship Anchorage (LPD 23) was accepted by the Navy Sept. 17 after a brief, two-day underway period to check fixes and corrections that delayed completion by almost two months. – Defense News
Northrop Grumman is in talks with the the Air Force to keep the service’s 18 “Block 30″ Global Hawks flying through at least September 2013, AOL Defense has learned. That’s a win for Northrop and its backers in Congress over Air Force budgeteers who wanted to ground the long-range drones. – AOL Defense
The War
The 44th administration warned Monday that a judge’s ruling last week blocking a statute authorizing the indefinite detention of terrorism suspects has jeopardized its ability to continue detaining certain prisoners captured during the war in Afghanistan. – New York Times
Eli Lake reports: The new unauthorized, firsthand account of the Navy SEAL operation that killed Osama bin Laden makes clear that the mission’s success relied in large part on a CIA analyst named in the book as “Jen.” – The Daily Beast
Editorial: Judge Forrest’s diktat will almost surely be overturned—by the Second Circuit or the Supreme Court. But her ruling is an unhappy reminder that the legal left is still working hard to undermine the war on terror and that, thanks to Mr. Obama, some of those legal voices are now on the federal bench. – Wall Street Journal (subscription required)
