The Washington Post's Dana Hedgepath gives one example out of control deficit spending -- the Air Force says that its F-35 Joint Strike Fighter planes will be more expensive to build than originally anticipated and construction will be delayed two years. The Obama administration has already earmarked $11.4 billion ...

Last year Defense Secretary Robert Gates made a splashy announcement about re-ordering the Pentagon budget: Gates wanted the DOD budget increased yet again (the budget has doubled since 2001), but wanted to shift money away from costly weapons programs that the military never actually uses. According to the ...

The Washington Post's Mary Beth Sheridan and Greg Jaffe reports that Defense Sec. Robert Gates wants to merge together the Pentagon and State Departments responsibilities for nation-building in failing states like Somalia and Yemen: The proposal would concentrate existing and new money in three long-term funds totaling as much as $2 billion. They would be dedicated to training security forces, preventing conflicts and stabilizing violence-torn societies around the world. The funds would exist separately from the war budgets, and allow for quicker and better-coordinated response to looming or actual conflicts, officials said. In a memo to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, Gates noted that the huge increase in Pentagon funding for stabilization efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan has prompted complaints about the militarization of U.S. foreign policy. // ') ; } // ]]> The proposal "sets forth a new approach that could transcend these debates. It argues for a new model of shared responsibility and pooled resources for cross-cutting security challenges," Gates wrote in the unclassified Dec. 15 memo, which was obtained by The Washington Post. It is hard to see, though, how a $2 billion program can transcend any national security debate.

[caption id="attachment_5076" align="alignleft" width="192" caption="Boeing's C-17 Globemaster"][/caption] Via ProPublica, Ben Elgin and Keith Epstein have a really terrific piece in Business Week about the struggle to rid the defense spending bill of expensive, largely unnecessary Cold War-weapons projects. A few things caught my eye here, first a breakdown of how spending on weapons changed from the last Geroge W. Bush administration Pentagon bill to the first Barack Obama administration miltary budget (which the president signed Wednesday)

R. Jeffrey Smith of the Washington Post reports that despite the efforts of Barack Obama and Defense Sec. Robert Gates, utterly useless programs have made their way into the House military spending bill:

Roughly $2.75 billion of the extra funds -- all of which ...

Karen DeYoung of the Washington Post has a good catch from the White House policy statement on the defense spending bill that passed the Senate Armed Services committee: Barack Obama opposes a provision inserted by committee chairman Carl Levin that bans private contractors from ...

The Housed Armed Services Committee's decision last month to put $1.75 billion into the defense spending bill to keep the production line for the F-22 fighter jet open is even worse than you think, reports the Washington Post's R. Jeffrey Smith. It's been ...

Last week, I wrote a blog post critical of the "normally strong" Elisabeth Bumiller of the New York Times for her anti-septic profile of Robert Gates. Nowhere in the piece did Bumiller mention the central role Gates played in the 80's while at the CIA in either the Iran-Contra ...

Christopher Drew of the New York Times reports that Defense Sec. Bob Gates helped get military contractors General Dynamics and Northrop Grumman to cut a deal about who will build three Navy destroyers, which will cost anywhere between $3.3 billion to $5 billion ...

Defense Sec. Robert Gates released his Pentagon budget recommendations this afternoon claiming that, "These recommendations will profoundly reform how this department does business." Gates vowed a "fundamental overhaul" to Pentagon weapons acquisitions. And he stressed that in devising this outline, he consulted with President Obama and ...