This comes from a good article by the Wall Street Journal's Johnathan Weisman and Deborah Solomon on the Obama administration's efforts to manage the national debt: The White House is in the early stages of considering what bigger moves it might ...

Apropos of the mass shooting at Fort Hood, Texas military base yesterday (allegedly done by a former Afghanistan soldier and Army psychiatrist), The Washington Post's Ann Scott Tyson has a valuable piece on the wrenching mental health conditions of soldiers who make repeated deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. A ...

General Eric Shinseki gained a reputation as a straight shooter way back in 2003, when he told the Senate Armed Services Committee that controlling Iraq after an invasion would require hundreds of thousands of troops.  Then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had a different view on the subject, and before ...

ProPublica's T. Christian Miller has a very good piece on an issue that has fallen out of the headlines: the deep reliance on private contractors to fight the Iraq and Afghanistan War. The wars have not just lead to the deaths of 5,200 U.S. troops but also 1,600 contract ...

It's, unfortunately, not surprising, but the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have had a huge mental health toll on U.S. troops.The New York Times' James Dao looks at a study that 37 percent of all Iraq and Afghanistan soldiers that entered the Dept. of ...

James Dao of the New York Times investigates the rapidly growing number of benefit claims unprocessed by the Dept. of Veterans Affairs -- 400,000 in the past year compared with 253,000 six years ago. And the number could swell to one million if ...

Analysis of Defense Sec. Robert Gates' proposed Pentagon budget has tended to focus on what Cold War-era weapons will and won't live on. But as Kimberly Hefling of the Associated Press reminds us, another budget change is money for veteran's health care: Gates wants $47 billion more to care ...

Catching up on weekend transition news, Barack Obama is expected to name Eric Shinseki, the former Army chief of staff, secretary of Veteran Affairs. As the New York Times' Jackie Calmes reminds us, Shinseki is most famous for telling Congress before the 2003 invasion ...

The Washington Post's Carol D. Leonnig reports that federal agencies have combined to give about $5 billion in government contracts set aside for small businesses to actually very, very big businesses. Corporate giants like Lockheed Martin and SAIC are getting million in contracts from agencies like the Dept. of ...

The Dept. of Veterans Affairs is again under fire for not confronting the mental illnesses of returning U.S. troops. Norma Perez, who leads the Post-traumatic Stress Disorder program at a Texas Veterans Affairs hospital, told her staff to avoid giving PTSD diagnoses to Iraq and Afghanistan soldiers. Perez instead suggested ...