As we mark the painful anniversary of what the late Ted Sorensen called the Bush administration's "mindless, needless, senseless" invasion and occupation of Iraq, none of the architects of the war have yet publicly apologized for their dereliction of duty. In fact, many of them have taken the opposite tack.

With the election decided, lawmakers have returned to Washington with just seven weeks to negotiate an agreement to avert sequestration, which would impose about $1 trillion in cuts to Pentagon spending and domestic programs. The crude across-the-board cuts of sequestration are not smart budget policy. But these negotiations present an...

Co-written with Robert Ward

Stories about the decline of the Air Force are flooding the media. For example, in AOL Defense Mackenzie Eaglen and Doug Birkey claim that the Air Force is "slowly going out of business" because of budget cuts and won't be able to...

This post was co-written with Bill French.

The War in Iraq has ended. Osama bin Laden is dead. NATO is looking at a 2014 date for significantly reducing its operations in Afghanistan. A ten-year period of uncontrolled US defense spending has come to an end.

Yet some conservatives are...

Cabinet officers are expected to protect the interests of their departments. Therefore it is not surprising that Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta's letter to Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Lindsay Graham (R-S.C.) on Nov. 14, 2011 warns them that the effects of sequestration would be devastating for the Department of...

Over the next two months, the bipartisan "super committee" set up under the debt ceiling deal will work to find $1.2 trillion in deficit reduction over the next decade. Given the long-term threat that the federal deficit poses to American security, power, and interests, it is imperative that the committee...

In Congressional testimony over the past week, several high ranking military officers, led by Army General Martin Dempsey, the nominee to become the next Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have warned about the dire national security consequences that could occur if the defense budget is cut by more...

Less than a month after Obama got Osama, House Republicans still don't trust the president to safeguard U.S. national security. At least, that's only possibly explanation for this year's National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which passed the House yesterday and is now headed to the Democrat-controlled Senate.

While the NDAA...

As Congress and the administration try to agree on reductions in federal spending, in order to avoid a government shutdown, the question about reducing the baseline defense budget for FY 2011 and FY 2012 has emerged as a point of contention. To understand why it should not be, it is...

Recently when I appeared on CNBC to discuss the crisis in Egypt, I received an email from a listener asking how someone who served about 5 years in the Reagan administration could now work at a progressive, i.e. liberal, think tank like the Center for American Progress. I received similar...

If Secretary of Defense Robert Gates wants to ensure that the reductions he proposed on August 10, 2010 are meaningful, he can set a good example by trimming his own bureaucracy, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, or OSD, and eliminating the civilian secretaries of the military departments.

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Admiral Michael Mullen correctly criticized Lt. General Benjamin Mixon, commanding general of the U.S. Army, Pacific, for writing to Stars and Stripes on March 8, 2010 expressing his opposition to repealing "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," the law that bans openly gay men and women...

Now that President Obama has decided to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan the question of how to pay for this increased level of operations has arisen. In fact the question of how to pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan should have been raised shortly after the attacks...

The Senate is locked in a heated debate on the future of the F-22, the Air Force's 5th generation fighter plane. It is the most advanced air-to-air combat fighter plane in the world, and at $350 million per plane, it is also the most expensive. President Obama is threatening a...

The President's Critics Can't Tell The Difference Between Weakness And Wisdom

Over the last week, as Iranian demonstrators have inspired the world by taking to the streets in defiance of Iran's authoritarian government, a number of American conservatives have engaged in a cynical campaign against President Obama's foreign...

Last week, Ali Gharib made the important point that what's happening in Iran is thus far not a rejection of the Islamic republic, but a struggle over its founding principles. Reviewing Moussavi's formal statement Saturday, Gary Sick described it as diagnosis of "a revolution gone wrong," writing that...

By Lawrence J. Korb, Laura Conley

New proposals from Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) to increase U.S. troop commitments and development assistance to Afghanistan are long overdue and yet contradicted by his policy prescriptions for U.S. forces in Iraq. Our battle-weary soldiers in Iraq cannot leave without a plan for...

President Bush today announced that he would be following U.S. Army General David Petraeus' recommendations to withdraw 25 percent of American combat forces from Iraq by the end of July. Despite the president's assertion that the withdrawal of these troops represents a "return on success" from his "surge" policy, the...

The deadly shooting of Iraqi civilians by guards working for Blackwater USA in Baghdad on Sept. 16 should raise many questions about the role of private contractors in U.S. national security. So, too, should the Bush administration's opposition to a House bill that seeks to place all private contractors in...

In his testimony before the Congress on September 10 and 11, General Petraeus will make the case that, despite the fact that the Iraqi government is not meeting the benchmarks proposed by the White House a year ago, certain positive developments during the last nine months since the surge began...