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defense spending
After a dozen years of robust demand for their skills, companies providing technical services to the military are facing shrinking markets. One reason is the winding down of overseas wars, and another is deficit-reduction measures. Production of military hardware is expected to generate stronger
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Date:
4/24/2013
When Bill Clinton entered the White House 20 years ago, he and his fellow Democrats were primed to claim the "peace dividend" generated by the end of the Cold War. Pentagon spending on weapons and force structure was slashed, enabling Clinton to balance the budget in his second term. But before
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Date:
4/16/2013
Many experts believe that the Pentagon has entered a prolonged period of declining budgets. If that proves true, it will only be the third major downturn in military demand since the modern defense industry emerged during the 1950s in response to the security challenge posed by the Soviet Union.
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Date:
4/9/2013
In his first major address as Secretary of Defense, Chuck Hagel identified the elephant in the room when it comes to the future of the Department of Defense (DoD): the Pentagon has become an inefficient, top-heavy, bureaucratized organization seemingly as devoted to social service programs as it
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Date:
4/4/2013
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) released its 11th annual assessment of major defense acquisition programs last week, reporting that the long-term cost of the programs had declined $152 billion between 2011 and 2012. Most of the projected savings resulted from program cancellations and
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Date:
4/1/2013
There has long been a school of thought among defense experts and military historians that tight defense budgets produce improved strategic thought and better military-technical innovation. Advocates of this view point to the interval between the two world wars, the so-called “Inter War period,”
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Date:
3/12/2013
Republicans certainly have a point when they say it's hard to see how a two-percent sequestration of the federal budget will cause major damage. In the case of the military, though, the cuts really will be devastating. Half of the cuts will come from the fifth of the budget that is defense spending
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Date:
2/25/2013
For an institution that professes to be apolitical, the Pentagon has in recent weeks conducted a political campaign to protect its budget worthy of any special interest. In fact, in some ways it is worse. The way the Department of Defense (DoD) in general, but particularly the uniformed services
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Date:
2/21/2013
In a political system more polarized than at any time in recent memory, there is agreement across virtually the entire political spectrum on one thing: sequestration will do serious, possibly irreparable, damage to U.S. national security. This is a view shared by President Obama, House Speaker John
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Date:
2/20/2013
When the Soviet Union went out of business in 1991, many defense-industry executives feared their companies might suffer the same fate. What followed was the biggest fire sale in the history of the defense sector, as some companies sought to exit the business before valuations collapsed while others
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Date:
2/13/2013
With the sequestration doomsday clock clicking ever closer to midnight, the Pentagon has weighed in with its apocalyptic predictions. As described in text and multi-colored charts, the services will respond to sequestration by, in part, furloughing hundreds of thousands of civilian employees, eliminating
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Date:
2/8/2013
In today’s Wall Street Journal, Michelle Flournoy, former Under Secretary of Defense and once rumored to be a candidate for the top slot at the Department of Defense, makes a strong case for fundamentally changing the way the government extracts savings from the defense budget. Flournoy points
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Date:
2/5/2013
Pentagon leaders have been warning for years that formulaic cuts to the defense budget would damage America's military, and now it's about to happen. The first blow will come not from sequestration as everybody expected, but from a continuing resolution that limits fiscal 2013 spending to prior-year
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Date:
1/29/2013
This week's fiscal compromise in Washington includes a two-month delay in implementing the sequestration provisions of the Budget Control Act. That's even better news for the defense sector than it sounds, because the outcome of negotiations this week strongly suggests that sequestration as currently
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Date:
1/2/2013
If the Department of Defense (DoD) were a private corporation it would be number one in the world in terms of its logistics system, supply chain and inventory, ahead of Walmart, Costco or McDonald’s. The Pentagon spends some $200 billion annually on logistics and maintenance alone and $400 billion
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Date:
12/12/2012
Being a world military superpower carries with it a lot of benefits. Even during the Cold War, when the United States confronted the Soviet Union, there were a host of political and economic benefits associated with staring down the Russian Bear. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the U.S.
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Date:
12/10/2012
If the Department of Defense (DoD) were a country it would be the 18th or 19th largest economy in the world, ahead of developed economies such as Switzerland, Belgium and Sweden. Unfortunately, DoD has less in common with these countries and more with today’s “sick man” of Europe, Greece. Both the
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Date:
11/30/2012
In some ways, the first four years of the Obama Administration were not that bad for U.S. national security. Defense budgets for the past three years have remained higher than anyone would have imagined. The President ended the U.S. involvement in Iraq, albeit without gaining an agreement with Baghdad
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Date:
10/29/2012
Defense executives in the nation's capital are less worried about Hurricane Sandy than they are about the budgetary storm that will befall federal spending at year's end, but if Mitt Romney is elected president their fears are likely to dissipate quickly. The Obama Administration has set defense
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Date:
10/29/2012
Unlike many of my colleagues, I found last Monday’s foreign policy debate informative. For example, I found out that the President’s views on weapons systems, force structure and sequestration are simplistic, at best and completely cockeyed, at worst. Responding to Governor Romney’s statement that
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Date:
10/24/2012
On September 23, 1999, Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush gave the major defense and foreign policy address of his campaign for the White House. He chose a military academy in South Carolina called The Citadel as the setting for his remarks. U.S. embassies in Africa had recently
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Date:
10/12/2012
The Obama Administration has requested $156 billion in funding for the Navy in the fiscal year that began October 1. That's a $10 billion reduction from what the White House sought in the prior fiscal year, but still more than any other nation spends on its entire defense establishment (China's
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Date:
10/8/2012
Jason Sherman of InsideDefense.com reports this week that a Pentagon analysis of trends in the industrial base raises doubts about the military's ability to preserve its five-year lead in fighter technology. He quotes a passage from the analysis with worrisome implications for America's global
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Date:
9/26/2012
Discussions to date about sequestration have focused on major programs such as Medicare and defense spending or on large companies like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, SAIC and IBM. Lost in the noise is the potentially devastating impact on small and disadvantaged businesses. The irony is that both parties
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Date:
9/19/2012
Harbingers of doom are afflicting the defense industry. Threats are receding and so is federal spending. How can the shares of military suppliers fail to follow? Maybe so, but there are powerful reasons to suspect that defense stocks are still a better investment than shares in most other economic
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Date:
9/10/2012
Today’s jobs report may be bad news for President Obama and possibly good news for Governor Romney but it is disastrous news for the American people. The economy produced less than 100,000 net new jobs (and if the past few months are prologue, this number will be revised down next month). The manufacturing
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Date:
9/7/2012
Even as the presidential election campaign heats up, foreign and defense policy are conspicuously absent from most of the discussions. In fact, the state of national security has been reduced to a “they said, they said” about who is responsible for creating the imminent fiscal cliff, in general,
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Date:
9/5/2012
The 2012 Republican platform rejects the extremism at both ends of the political spectrum. It explicitly takes the current administration to task for its failures to match its strategic vision with an appropriate investment of resources in military capabilities, its unwillingness to compromise on
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Date:
8/29/2012
One of the few ways to get the media’s attention in Washington is to claim that a government program is going to be more expensive than was originally projected. The bigger the number, the bigger the headline and the greater the feigned outrage on Capitol Hill. This is particularly true for major
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Date:
7/27/2012
For years we at the Lexington Institute have been sounding the tocsin about the impact of bad regulations and misguided acquisition policies on the cost of defense goods and services. We published a study that argued that the Department of Defense could save tens of billions of dollars a year by
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Date:
7/26/2012
For the past sixty years, U.S. defense planning has counted on the quality of its weapons and personnel to make up for a persistent shortfall in quantities. During the Cold War the United States pushed the technological envelope to acquire better tanks, airplanes, submarines and missiles than those
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Date:
7/23/2012
The Aerospace Industries Association (AIA) released a study on Tuesday estimating that if the sequestration provisions of the Budget Control Act are triggered on January 2 as currently legislated, the number of jobs lost would be about as great as the number created during the time President Obama
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Date:
7/18/2012
The Program for Public Consultation, the Center for Public Integrity and the Stimson Center recently published a report on the attitudes of Americans towards defense spending. Never mind that the most interesting information was about the growing willingness of Americans of all persuasions to cut
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Date:
7/17/2012
For more than a decade, the British Ministry of Defence (MOD) has pioneered in the area of reducing defense costs by increasing its reliance on the private sector. In 2001, rather than trying to sustain an oversized and expensive public sector defense research enterprise, Tony Blair's Labor government
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Date:
6/8/2012
Senior executives at major defense companies are warning that the sequestration provisions contained in last year's Budget Control Act could produce chaos if they trigger as planned on January 2. The law requires that $60 billion be cut from defense accounts in fiscal 2013 as part of a ten-year
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Date:
6/8/2012
Everyone likes to save money if they can. That is why many people go to warehouse stores, comparison shop, search on EBay for bargains, visit thrift stores, take advantage of two-for-one sales and get multiple bids from contractors. When it comes to buying commodity items or hiring someone to do
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Date:
6/7/2012
Under the terms of the Budget Control Act passed into law last year, federal programs are due for automatic, across-the-board spending cuts beginning on January 2. The law calls for $1.2 trillion in new savings over the nine years between 2013 and 2021, with cuts split equally between defense and
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Date:
5/30/2012
No doubt one of the pleasures of being Secretary of Defense is to be a commencement speaker at one of this nation’s military academies. Whether at West Point, Annapolis or Colorado Springs, it is a chance to speak to and perhaps make a lasting impression on a generation of military officers. Making
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Date:
5/30/2012
As defense companies search for segments of the military market that may be insulated from a downturn in defense spending, one area that has been heavily favored is intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance -- widely referred to in the business as ISR. The thinking of corporate planners and
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Date:
5/24/2012
As the clock ticks down to the January 2 deadline when automatic spending cuts are due to be triggered by last year's Budget Control Act, people in the defense sector are getting edgy. With little progress in Congress to avert sequestration likely before November elections, there will only be a
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Date:
5/22/2012
Although I have been in Washington for more than 35 years I cannot think of a law more stupid than the 2011 Budget Control Act (BCA). Not only did the Act first cut $489 billion from the defense budget over ten years but it mandated an additional $500 billion reduction starting in January 2013 if
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Date:
5/18/2012
The leadership of the U.S. Army claims to have learned important lessons from the failure of its multi-billion dollar effort to design and build the so-called Future Combat System (FCS). The FCS was supposed to be a “system of systems” with specially designed manned and unmanned ground and air vehicles,
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Date:
3/5/2012
One of President Obama’s chief advisors recently made headlines with the claim that unemployment benefits stimulate the economy. This is a repetition of the administration’s Keynesian mantra we have heard for three years. The theory is that because unemployment benefits go to those with immediate
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Date:
2/23/2012
In 2011, Congress and the White House entered into a Faustian bargain in order to satisfy the competing demands for raising the debt ceiling and deficit reduction. The Budget Control Act (BCA) of 2011 mandated some $900 billion of cuts over 10 years in exchange for an initial debt limit increase
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Date:
2/21/2012
Last week President Obama took the unusual step of going to the Pentagon to announce a new defense strategy. In doing so he did more than put his personal stamp on the new document. Obama also was drumming up support for the budget cuts ($480 billion over ten years) that had necessitated the reductions
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Date:
1/9/2012
Former senator, governor, chairman of Goldman Sachs and self-proclaimed smartest man in the room, John Corzine, appeared today before a Congressional panel to answer questions about the events surrounding the bankruptcy of his brokerage firm, MF Global. To use a colloquial expression, the company
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Date:
12/8/2011
Last week, Byron Callan of Capital Alpha Partners put out a note questioning the widely-held belief among defense analysts that U.S. military spending occurs in cycles. He suggested that some analysts are too tightly focused on the postwar period, and provided charts from other periods and countries
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Date:
12/6/2011
One of the legendary events in the history of U.S. defense planning is a dinner that was held in 1993 between senior officials of the Department of Defense and some fifteen CEOs of the major U.S. defense industries. The story, as recounted by Norm Augustine, then chief executive of Martin Marietta,
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Date:
11/29/2011
The number-one question that moderators should be putting to candidates for the Republican presidential nomination at tonight's defense debate is how they would maintain robust military spending in the absence of tax increases without borrowing more money from China. If they don't have a coherent response,
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Date:
11/22/2011
The Department of Defense (DoD) is faced with an impossible problem. It needs to find a minimum of $480 billion in savings over the next ten years. At the same time, the Pentagon cannot forego its responsibilities to maintain the military arm of the world’s sole superpower, one with global interests,
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Date:
11/7/2011
The modern international system was created by Europe and, for the last 65 years, has been largely maintained by the United States with help from allies across the globe. Now, as both the United States and Europe face their worst financial crises in post-war history they are looking for ways to
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Date:
11/4/2011
Yesterday, the chiefs of the military services spoke before Congress with a single voice to deliver a simple message: the $600 billion in additional spending cuts required if the super committee fails and sequestration is triggered would be disastrous for the military. According to the Army’s new
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Date:
11/3/2011
Two unassailable realities are aligning to drive the reshaping of the U.S. military. The first is a shift in the focus of U.S. strategic interests and planning to the Asia-Pacific region. The reasons for this are obvious. The region from India eastward around to East and Southeast Asia and then
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Date:
10/20/2011
Discussion of President Obama’s decision to send 100 U.S. Special Forces to Central Africa has focused largely on the political nature of the decision. Much less attention has been given to the fact that the United States is one of the few nations that is capable of rapidly deploying military power
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Date:
10/17/2011
Everybody in the defense business seems to be focused on the deliberations of the congressional "super committee" set up by the Budget Control Act. If the panel fails to recommend $1.2 trillion in deficit reductions over ten years -- or Congress fails to enact the recommendations -- automatic cuts
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Date:
10/17/2011
Anyone who has ever taken a class on economics knows about the law of supply and demand. Supply and demand functions are usually expressed in terms of prices and quantities. The supply of things rises as the price increases and falls as the price declines. The demand for things will do the opposite;
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Date:
10/14/2011
In his first major policy address, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta presented his vision of the military of the future. There are reports that Panetta has already signed off on a new Defense Planning Guidance, the key document that lays out a U.S. defense strategy and defines the key planning and
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Date:
10/12/2011
When Northrop Grumman Chairman Wes Bush addressed a meeting of government officials and contractors at the company's new headquarters in Virginia last week, he began by thanking local officials for their help in moving to the location. Bush disclosed the decision to move the headquarters from Los
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Date:
10/11/2011
The Army has just published its long-anticipated Request for Proposal (RFP) for the next phase of its Joint Light Tactical Vehicle (JLTV) program. The JLTV was intended initially to replace the venerable Humvee while improving on that system’s survivability and performance. At the same time, the
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Date:
10/4/2011
When the White House went looking for a credible figure to replace retiring defense secretary Robert Gates, Leon Panetta looked like the perfect candidate. His two-year tenure at the CIA had been a smashing success, and Panetta knew President Obama well from attending his daily intelligence briefings.
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Date:
10/3/2011
The conventional wisdom in Washington is that defense budgets will have to be slashed. For many, including the outgoing Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, reduced spending is viewed as an important part of the effort to restore U.S. economic strength. To some, particularly in Congress, defense
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Date:
9/28/2011
Back on August 18, I suggested that the Budget Control Act (BCA) contained two traps, one for the Obama Administration and the other for Republicans in Congress, particularly the new “Tea Party” faction. The traps are built into the automatic cuts that will be triggered by a failure of the so-called
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Date:
9/28/2011
The National Taxpayer Union (NTU) and the Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) are two generally well-regarded advocacy organizations with respectable analytic capabilities. But the NTU's and PIRG’s proposals to reduce defense spending neither further the national discussion on how much to reduce
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Date:
9/16/2011
This week the defense subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee cut $26 billion from the Obama Administration's fiscal 2012 budget request. The move is intended to align future Pentagon spending with the requirements of the recently enacted Budget Control Act. However, the cuts the subcommittee
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Date:
9/16/2011
Michael Lewis of Lazard Capital Markets predicts that defense stocks will be encountering headwinds as the congressional super-committee set up to rein in deficits deliberates on budget cuts. Maybe so, but analysts have been surprised by the strong turnout at industry investor days and Lockheed
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Date:
9/13/2011
Large defense cuts are coming. If the military is to avoid becoming a hollow force it needs to find new ways to save money while still maintaining critical capabilities.
One area worth examining is roles and missions. There have been several attempts over the last few decades to find budgetary
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Date:
9/8/2011
Last week saw a continuation of the recent drumbeat of bad news about defense spending, with many experts predicting that outlays for weapons will fall steadily in the years ahead. So of course the equities of the biggest military contractors sold off, right? Wrong! According to Byron Callan
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Date:
8/30/2011
Deep reductions in defense spending, however ill-advised, seem all but inevitable given America’s fiscal condition. In order to realize up to $100 billion in annual savings in the worst-case scenario, the Department of Defense will be required to go where the money is, namely people and operations
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Date:
8/29/2011
Since the President probably is still working on the big economic proposal to be unveiled in September, I would like to offer him a few thoughts. Over the past two and a half years the administration has put forward one spending initiative after another. It is difficult to remember them all or to
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Date:
8/25/2011
Washington as a whole and defense experts, in particular, are bracing for massive reductions in defense spending coming out of the deliberations of the Congressional super committee. If automatic budget cuts are triggered, defense could see budgets decline by around $1 trillion over the next decade.
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Date:
8/24/2011
Way back in the Stone Age -- 1994 -- the well-respected accounting firm Coopers and Lybrand did a study of the impact of government regulations on defense contracts. They found that DoD paid on average a regulatory cost premium of 18 percent of contract value. The regulatory “tax” for advanced technology
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Date:
8/19/2011
White House budget director Jacob Lew released fiscal 2013 guidance to government departments and agencies on August 17 that has reinforced the pessimism of many in the defense sector. The guidance directed federal managers to submit budgets for 2013 that were five percent and ten percent below
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Date:
8/19/2011
One of the silliest statements coming out of the various deficit reduction discussions is that “everything is on the table.” This is usually taken to mean political sacred cows such as Social Security, Medicare, defense and tax increases. But there are other items, not easily quantifiable, that
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Date:
8/15/2011
It is clear now that significant, possibly draconian, cuts in defense spending are coming. The size of the potential reductions is so great that it cannot be addressed by trimming programs at the edges, the so-called salami slicing technique. Nor can it be resolved by cutting procurement. The reality
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Date:
8/12/2011
The U.S. economy is currently enduring its slowest recovery since the Great Depression. One reason for the modest rate of recovery is that consumers are deleveraging from the excessively optimistic spending patterns of the past decade. They hardly have a choice, since a weak housing market has
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Date:
8/12/2011
There's a high likelihood that when Congress grasps the impact of the deficit agreement it embraced last week, legislators will move to modify the law. With the economy faltering and interest rates at near-record lows, it's a lot easier to borrow more money right now than live with the fallout
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Date:
8/10/2011
Analysts are warning that the bipartisan deficit reduction deal could gut defense and undermine U.S. national security. No one disagrees over the math. Defense has already been tagged with over $800 billion in spending cuts since the Obama Administration took office. These include almost $400 billion
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Date:
8/9/2011
Last week's deficit agreement clearly didn't do much to restore market confidence, but it did send a clear signal about the likely direction of future defense budgets -- down. The agreement put in place a two-step process that in the first installment would cut military outlays by about $350 billion
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Date:
8/9/2011
The debate in Washington today is not whether or not to reduce defense spending but how much to cut. Never mind that defense spending as a share of GDP is at its lowest level since World War II or that as a share of federal spending defense continues to decline. Nor does it seem important to deficit
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Date:
8/8/2011
War is the real mother of invention. The Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts are notable for, among many things, promoting the development and deployment of a wide range of innovative military weapons systems, products and processes. Some of these are unique to the circumstances of our two current conflicts
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Date:
8/5/2011
Chalk up another victory for House Republicans. They struck a tentative deal on raising the debt limit that focuses only on spending cuts, includes Medicare in programs vulnerable to sequestration and requires an up or down vote on the balanced budget amendment. They got all this while giving up
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Date:
8/1/2011
The senior leaders of the U.S. military have finally said enough is enough. You cannot wear out the military by requiring that it fights two, even three wars over a decade, conduct countless out-of-area deployments, maintain forward presence around the world, provide humanitarian assistance in dozens
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Date:
7/27/2011
Over the past several years, the Pentagon has canceled the Navy's next-generation cruiser and destroyer, the Air Force's most capable new fighter, the Army's future family of networked combat vehicles, and the Marine Corps' successor to Cold War amphibious vehicles. It has also stretched out the
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Date:
7/19/2011
All the pundits are certain that the dominant issue in the upcoming 2012 election will be the state of the economy. No doubt this will be a key determinant of winners and losers. But a sleeper issue that may come to the fore is the role of the United States in the world and our willingness to maintain
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Date:
5/25/2011
How are the U.S. military and intelligence communities being rewarded for their spectacular success in getting Osama bin Laden? There has been lots of praise for the enormous effort undertaken by intelligence analysts to find and fix bin Laden’s location. The boys from SEAL Team Six got to meet
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Date:
5/9/2011
Today’s earthquake in Japan and the resultant tsunami that swept across the Pacific stand as an immediate reminder of how swiftly unexpected events can change the circumstances for individuals, nations and entire regions of the globe. Although earthquakes cannot be predicted, Japan had planned for
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Date:
3/11/2011
In his effort to squeeze savings from the military budget that can be reinvested in modernization, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has taken on such sacred cows as the low co-payments retirees make for healthcare and the bloated number of general officers. The result of this effort has been some
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Date:
3/8/2011
In his appearance yesterday before the House Armed Services Committee (HASC), Secretary of Defense Robert Gates took issue with efforts by some lawmakers to try and reduce the current budget deficit on the back of defense. "I would tell you, with a $1.6 trillion deficit, if you cut the Defense Department
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Date:
2/17/2011
In the general rush to cut the budget deficit, much ink has been spilled over various schemes to reduce the size and sophistication of the U.S. military. The most well-publicized of these proposals, that of the deficit commission, called for cutting a trillion dollars from defense over the next
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Date:
1/3/2011
The rush to cut defense spending is on. The president’s deficit commission proposed a trillion dollars in cuts over a decade. Defense department officials are acknowledging that some portion of the $100 billion Secretary of Defense Robert Gates hoped to save through efficiencies will have to be
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Date:
12/17/2010
Last month, the deficit commission recommended some $100 billion in cuts to the defense budget over the next decade. Since then, the idea that of course defense spending would have to bear some of the burden of eliminating the deficit has become axiomatic in Washington. Even pro-defense conservatives
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Date:
12/13/2010
There are reports circulating in European newspapers that a number of major NATO countries including France, Italy and Germany plan to reduce their defense spending sharply in the next few years. The reasons for this are fairly prosaic: a combination of rising costs for entitlements and the continuing
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Date:
12/7/2010
There are at least a half dozen proposals floating around Washington for reducing defense spending. From the deficit commission to the sustainable defense task force and now the Brookings Institution all these proposals employ the same old, tired approach to garnering the majority of their proposed
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Date:
12/3/2010
The calls for cutting defense spending are reaching a fevered pitch in Washington. An unlikely concatenation of individuals and groups from libertarian Congressman Ron Paul and his Tea Party-backed son, Senator-elect Rand Paul, to hard left Representative Barney Frank and now the seemingly centrist
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Date:
11/16/2010
Human beings search for patterns. It's one of the traits that makes us different from squirrels. But sometimes we insist on finding patterns that are not really there. A case in point is the notion that defense spending follows a mechanistic pattern of boom and bust cycles. This idea is explicitly
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Date:
9/15/2010
This week Secretary of Defense Robert Gates announced a series of decisions intended to begin the process of reining in the explosion of overhead costs in the Department of Defense. Among other decisions, Gates said that he was taking the unprecedented step of actually eliminating one of ten unified
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Date:
8/11/2010
Yesterday, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates held a news conference to lay out his much anticipated plans to wring costs out of the Defense Department’s overhead activities as part of an effort to find $100 billion of savings to be applied to investments in future capabilities. He is freezing senior
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Date:
8/10/2010
The Defense Business Board (DBB), a panel consisting of senior former defense officials, business executives and economists has just published its study of how the Department of Defense (DoD) can reduce overhead costs and improve business practices. According to the Board, if DoD were a corporation
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Date:
7/27/2010
On June 28, the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics, Dr. Ashton Carter held a convocation for defense industry leaders. The subject was restoring affordability and productivity in defense acquisition. The Under Secretary began by telling his audience that the era
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Date:
7/12/2010
Ten years ago, I was invited to participate in a RAND Corporation project on the presidential transition. Each of the major presidential candidates sent a senior national-security advisor to brief the RAND panel, laying out their contending views of what the future would require. I can't remember
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Date:
3/8/2010
On Tuesday, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee to give testimony on the FY2011 defense budget. In response to a question from Colorado Senator Udall on the likelihood of the Department of Defense having to accept future budget reductions, the Secretary
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Date:
2/4/2010
The federal budget is trapped in a structural deficit that the White House says will average 6% of gross domestic product over the next ten years. Since federal spending only claims about 20% of GDP in a normal year, that means the Obama Administration expects to borrow over a quarter of all government
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Date:
1/25/2010
Public Policy 101 says that whenever the United States faces an economic crisis there must be a guns versus butter debate. The argument always goes the same way. We are told that we can either have guns or butter, meaning national security or domestic security by way of entitlements and non-defense
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Date:
1/14/2010