DEFENSE The Pentagon's New Strategy On Monday, the Obama administration released its Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) which, despite deferring some hard choices, signaled a stark break with the approach pursued by the Bush administration four years earlier. The QDR is released every four years and is intended to be an over-arching strategy document for the Department of Defense. As Peter W. Singer of the Brookings Institution explained, the QDR "provides a look at how the Pentagon sees the world and how it intends to move forward." Importantly, this new QDR recognizes the complexity of 21st century challenges and abandons simplistic Cold War-style monikers to describe the threats and challenges confronting the United States. The QDR also broke new ground by finally acknowledging the potential dangers posed to the United States by climate change. However, like past QDRs, it failed to adequately answer many of the hard strategic and budgetary questions. By neither weighting competing priorities nor recommending any difficult trade-offs necessary to rebalance the force, the document loses strategic focus and fails to set a course for fiscal discipline after a decade of runaway spending.
A 21st CENTURY APPROACH: The QDR wisely abandons outdated strategic constructs and simplistic organizing monikers and instead recognizes and accepts the complexity of the modern strategic environment. The Washington Post reports that the QDR "predicts a future dominated by 'hybrid' wars, in which traditional states will fight more like guerrillas and insurgents will arm themselves with increasingly sophisticated technology, such as antitank weapons and missiles." This reflects the experience gained from Iraq and Afghanistan and corrects earlier assumptions that engaging in forcible regime change would be relatively easy. As a result, the QDR abandons the "two-war doctrine," in place since just after the Cold War, that held the U.S. had to be prepared to fight two conventional wars became unrealistic and outdated. Furthermore, the document drops the favored "long war" concept of the Bush-Rumsfeld 2006 QDR. Assistant professor at the University of Kentucky Rob Farley explains, "the 2006 QDR was explicitly structured around the concept of the 'Long War,' which is essentially another name for the War on Terror," adding that it was "striking the degree to which the Cold War could easily be substituted for the Long War, with communists playing the role of terrorists. In the 2010 QDR, not so much. The United States is fighting 'wars' rather than a 'Long War' which is a crucial distinction." FIGHTING 'THE WARS WE ARE IN': The QDR shifts the focus of the military to the wars that we are currently fighting. For too many years, the Pentagon remained excessively focused on high-end systems to counter obscure hypothetical threats, instead of prioritizing basic necessities like getting body armor to the troops or building vehicles that could withstand an IED blast. Defense News notes that "Defense Secretary Robert Gates has been working to force the Defense Department to shift more focus and annual spending toward, as he puts it, 'the wars we are in today.'" In doing so, the QDR calls for greater investment in technology to defeat improvised explosive devices (IEDs), more helicopters and special forces, and more UAVs all of which have direct relevance to the troops on the ground. The review also reduces the role of nuclear weapons and prioritizes combating nuclear proliferation and nuclear terrorism. CLIMATE SECURITY: For the first time, the QDR acknowledges that climate change is an important force impacting the United States as well as the global strategic environment and as a result should become an important factor in U.S. defense planning and operations. It also sets a priority on decreasing the military's reliance on fossil fuels and advocates a shift toward greater use of renewable energy sources, since "energy efficiency can serve as a force multiplier." Southwestern University professor Erik Loomis explains that the fact "that the new QDR even discusses climate change is a big step. The 2006 version, written during the Rumsfeld years, couldn't care less." In response to the threat of climate change, the QDR advocates working with the militaries of at risk nations to help them better prepare for disaster response and calls on the Senate to finally ratify the Law of the Sea Treaty in no small measure due to the potential conflict over the Arctic. Importantly, the QDR emphasizes the reality that disaster response has become an important function of the U.S. military and that is in the national security interests of the U.S. to strengthen weakened governments in the face of natural disaster. However, the strategic assessments of the impact climate change should go further, as Loomis concludes, "In the end then, the QDR's approach to climate change is a good first step, but little more. ... [H]opefully, the next QDR will build upon these early ideas." SOME HARD CHOICES DEFERRED: The President recently announced a spending freeze but exempted the Department of Defense, despite the fact that defense spending is more than half of all discretionary spending and its budgets over the last decade have ballooned out of control, rising to a historically high level. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) have said that the Pentagon should be included in the spending freeze and the former Secretary of the Navy, Sen. Jim Webb (D-VA), stated that defense spending should not be "sacrosanct." Unfortunately, the QDR fails to set the path toward fiscal sanity. As the Washington Independent's Spencer Ackerman reported, "the cuts in the QDR will not be as extensive as the ones announced in last year's Pentagon budget." The failure to make hard budgetary choices reflects a lack of strategic focus and a failure to set strategic priorities. As Lawrence Korb of the Center for American Progress noted, "[S]pending on future weapons systems has outpaced spending on our troops." While the QDR calls for eliminating certain weapons programs and rightly advocates focusing on the "wars we are in," it fails to provide the adequate guidance to make the necessary budgetary tradeoffs needed to successfully rebalance the force to meet these priorities. Jim Thomas of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments concludes, "I think the review gets the diagnosis right on the big external challenges facing the Defense Department, but at the end of the day, the preexisting mismatch between the strategy and the [budget] program still exists." Singer assesses that "the 2010 review offers more a series of agenda items than a comprehensive vision. ... Without an overall vision, and without hard targets to drive change internally, I fear that many critical issues laid out in the 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review will remain in need of action when we revisit them four years from now." 
JUSTICE -- DEMINT BLOCKS A LESBIAN LATINA FROM SERVING ON THE D.C. SUPERIOR COURT: Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) -- who has opposed several key Obama nominees -- has been holding up the confirmation of Marisa Demeo for almost a year. President Obama nominated Demeo on March 24 to be a judge on the D.C. Superior Court and the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs endorsed her two months later. Superior Court judges are "usually approved by the Senate without generating controversy," but Demeo is now the Obama judicial nominee facing the longest confirmation delay. The National Law Journal reports that conservative objections seem to be based on her strong legal advocacy work on Hispanic and LGBT issues. In addition to holding several positions at the Department of Justice, Demeo has worked for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund and, as an openly gay woman, has been a member of the Human Rights Campaign and co-president of GAYLAW. DeMint declined to give many details about his hold, saying simply that a "number of Republicans had concerns" about her "very leftist activism." DeMint's block on Demeo is incredibly hypocritical, considering that in 2005 he said that "one of my goals" is "ensuring timely up-or-down votes for all nominees no matter who is President." "Senators were elected to advise and consent, not to grandstand and obstruct," DeMint added. D.C. Superior Court Chief Judge Lee Satterfield has said that if Demeo and another judge paired with her confirmation aren't confirmed within months, there will be a "dire situation" for the court. "[S]uch a scenario would certainly test our ability to administer justice for the people of the District of Columbia in a timely fashion," said Satterfield.
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Senate Democrats plan to unveil an $80 billion jobs package this week intended to tackle the country's unemployment problem. The Senate's leadership is "proposing that part of the money come from funds originally allocated to the financial-sector bailout effort." President Obama said for the first time Tuesday that cap-and-trade legislation "may need to be separated from a more popular 'green jobs' bill in the Senate, a maneuver that could kill what once had been one of the administration's top policy priorities." A White House spokesman said Obama still favors a bill that combines both. A "politically diverse group of bloggers, commentators, techies, and politicos" will today launch an online campaign, Demand Question Time, to call on the President to regularly hold televised debates and conversations following Friday's Obama-GOP event. The campaigners include The Nation's Katrina Vanden Heuvel and conservative activist Grover Norquist. AIG plans to hand out another $100 million in employee bonuses today, "a year after similar payments at the bailed-out insurance giant infuriated many Americans." The "retention payments" go to employees at the company's troubled Financial Products division, which has been blamed for AIG's downfall. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said yesterday that he has "no problem" with a plan -- which Iran formally rejected just weeks ago -- to "swap low-enriched uranium for fuel for a research reactor that produces medical isotopes." "We sign a contract to give 3.5 percent enriched uranium and receive 20 percent enriched ones after four or five months," Ahmadinejad said. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) "plans to take a shot at the health insurance industry next week by scheduling a vote on a smaller bill to revoke its half-century-old exemption from antitrust laws." The move is "part of her new two-track strategy to tackle things that won't be included in a more sweeping bill" while "giving her members something politically popular to vote on." A group of progressive federal lawmakers is calling for a constitutional amendment to make clear that "corporations do not have the same free speech rights as individuals," an attempt to "limit the impact of last month's Supreme Court decision gutting decades of campaign finance law." Reps. Donna Edwards (D-MD) and John Conyers (D-MI) have already introduced a bill in the House, and one will be put forward in the Senate soon. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the failed Christmas Day bomber, "started talking to investigators after two of his family members arrived in the United States and helped earn his cooperation." A senior administration official said that "with the family, the F.B.I. approached the suspect" and Abdulmutallab "has been cooperating for days." Former Indiana Sen. Dan Coats (R-IN) is expected to announce today that he will challenge Sen. Evan Bayh (D-IN) this year. Coats, who held the seat Bayh now holds from 1989 to 1999, "has worked as a lobbyist and served as U.S. ambassador to Germany during the George W. Bush administration" since leaving Congress. And finally: The Bill Press Show punked a reporter for The Hill, convincing him that he was talking to President Obama. Listen to it here. |
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"Next year, despite Mr. Obama's frequent campaign promises not to raise taxes on those making less than $250,000, people currently in the 10 percent, 25 percent, 28 percent, 33 percent and 36 percent personal income tax rates will all face higher tax rates."
-- Washington Times editorial, 2/02/10
VERSUS
"The president's budget assumes all the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts will be made permanent for everyone making less than $200,000 ($250,000 for couples), which is the majority of American households. ... [T]oday's rates on income tax, capital gains and dividends would remain the same."
-- CNN, 2/02/10
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