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Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel warned on Monday that U.S. troops are “close to the breaking point,” after many deployments — and Congress risks worsening the situation if it doesn’t help the Pentagon with its budget. “Our people are strong and resilient after 12 years of war, but they are under stress — and so are the institutions that support them,” Hagel told the Veterans of Foreign Wars at the group’s annual convention in Louisville, Ky. “Last week at Fort Bragg’s Soldier and Family Assistance Center, I met a first sergeant who told me that in Afghanistan, he froze up and...

A day without pay, the first of 11 through September, comes next week for more than 650,000 people who hold civilian jobs with the Defense Department. Officials worry that the Pentagon will be hit even harder by layoffs in 2014 if automatic budget cuts continue as planned. Roughly 85 percent of the department’s nearly 900,000 civilians around the world will be furloughed one day each week over the next three months, according to the latest statistics provided by the Pentagon. But while defense officials were able to shift money around to limit the furloughs this year, thousands of civilian, military...

TEL AVIV, Israel — Israel’s military fumed Monday over the discovery that the U.S. government had revealed details of a top-secret Israeli military installation in published bid requests. The Obama administration had promised to build Israel a state-of-the-art facility to house a new ballistic-missile defense system, the Arrow 3. As with all Defense Department projects, detailed specifications were made public so that contractors could bid on the $25 million project. The specifications included more than 1,000 pages of details on the facility, ranging from the heating and cooling systems to the thickness of the walls. "If an enemy of Israel...

The Obama Department of Defense is going to spend nearly $700 million to buy Russian Mi-17 helicopters for the Afghan Air Force. That’s right, $700 million of U.S. taxpayer money is going to fund our enemy’s air force. However, not only could this be considered treasonous, but even by the federal government’s 2013 National Defense Authorization Act they are in violation of their own legislation. According to Riz Novosti: WASHINGTON, April 4 (By Maria Young for RIA Novosti) – The US Department of Defense said Thursday it plans to sidestep a Congressional ban to purchase 30 helicopters from Russian state-owned...

Earlier this week, the campaign of Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., seized upon a column in the New York Post that described Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., as having urged Iraqi leaders in a private meeting to delay coming to an agreement with the Bush administration on the status of U.S. troops. "Obama has tried in private to persuade Iraqi leaders to delay an agreement on a drawdown of the American military presence," Post columnist Amir Taheri wrote, quoting Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, who told the Post that Obama, during his meeting with Iraqi leaders in July, "asked why we were...

Earlier this week, I wrote about the dirty tricks campaign against journalist Amir Taheri following his revelation that, in a private meeting in Iraq last July with Iraqi leaders, Barack Obama tried to persuade them to delay the agreement being hammered out with the US government on a draw-down of the American military presence. According to this account, which quoted Iraq’s foreign minister Hoshya Zebari (pictured), Obama had thus privately sought to undermine an American government foreign policy initiative – an explosive revelation. Taheri subsequently dismissed as tendentious Camp Obama’s response which he said deliberately confused two separate agreements under...

(Reuters) - France has ordered special forces to protect uranium sites run by state-owned Areva in Niger as the threat of attacks on its interests rises after its intervention against rebels in Mali, a military source said on Thursday. ... Seven workers, including five French nationals, were kidnapped in Arlit by al Qaeda's north African arm AQIM in September 2010. It later released three of the hostages but four French citizens are still being held. ... According to a parliamentary committee enquiring into France's supplies of uranium, about 18 percent of the raw material used to power France's 58 nuclear...

WASHINGTON: The problems that plague the Middle East, including Iran's nuclear ambitions and Syria's civil war, require "political, not military" solutions, US Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said Thursday. Saying the "old order" was vanishing in the region, Hagel stressed in a speech that the United States would work to promote democratic reform while bearing in mind the "limitations" of American power. Although the Pentagon chief made clear that Washington had not ruled out potential military action against Iran or Syria, his remarks highlighted President Barack Obama's cautious stance on resorting to armed force in the volatile region. He said that...

President Barack Obama delivered an impassioned speech Thursday at the memorial service for victims of the Boston Marathon bombing. But that was to be expected. We all know Obama can give a stem-winder. What wasn’t expected was that this would be by far the toughest week of the Obama presidency—the first time I can remember the president being dealt an unequivocal policy defeat. Only the “shellacking” of the 2010 midterm comes close, and even there a case can be made that achieving the decades-old progressive dream of universal health care was worth losing the House of Representatives and a filibuster-proof...

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel rejected the suggestion that President Barack Obama tapped him to “cut the heart out of the Pentagon,” pointedly reminding lawmakers Thursday that Congress approved the smaller, deficit-driven military budgets long before he took the job. Faced with a $487 billion budget cut over a decade, Hagel and Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the Pentagon had no choice in drawing up the politically unpopular reductions in the president's proposed $526.6 billion budget for next year. The blueprint calls for another round of domestic base closures, higher health care fees for...

United States Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel will visit Israel April 21, according to IDF Radio. … According to IDF Radio, the subject of Iran will likely top the agenda of the visit, as will the deterioration in Syria. Hagel will likely use the visit to try and shake free of his anti-Israel image, the radio station added. …

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel called for the Defense Department to be organized more efficiently than it was under Ronald Reagan after raising the possibility of cuts in pay and benefits for military members. Hagel blamed the prospective cuts on sequestration. “[F]iscal realities demand another hard look at personnel – how many people we have both military and civilian, how many we need, what these people do, and how we compensate them for their work, service, and loyalty with pay, benefits and health care,” Hagel said at the National Defense University today. He also hinted at cutting jobs for military brass....

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said on Thursday that North Korea's provocative actions and belligerent tone had "ratcheted up the danger" on the Korean peninsula, but he denied that the United States had aggravated the situation by flying stealth bombers to the region. "We have to take seriously every provocative, bellicose word and action that this new young leader has taken so far" since coming to power, Hagel told a Pentagon news conference, referring to Kim Jong-un.

The Uriminzokkiri website, linked to the regime, mentioned targets including Yeonpyeong island, which was attacked by Northern forces in 2010. Pyongyang has made a series of threats since its last nuclear test in February prompted the UN to tighten sanctions. The US said on Friday it would refocus missile defences to its west coast to counter the North's threats. Defence Secretary Chuck Hagel said 14 more batteries would be placed in Alaska by 2017, adding to 30 already in place along the coast.

- A suicide bomber wearing a vest bomb struck outside the Afghan defense ministry on Saturday, killing at least 10 people in a blast just hours after Chuck Hagel, the new United States defense secretary, arrived here in Kabul. And a short time later, another suicide bomber detonated his explosive in eastern Afghanistan before reaching his target, but killed eight children and a policeman, according to Afghan military and hospital officials.

Former Senator Chuck Hagel's confirmation as secretary of defence last week was important for several reasons, many of which have been exhaustively examined by media commentators in the US. But for Arab-Americans, there was another reason to celebrate the final vote: it represented vindication. I have known Mr Hagel for many years, and while there are areas where we have disagreed, I have always respected and valued his insights and his willingness to engage in thoughtful and reasoned discourse. I have also appreciated the fact that he never shied away from appearing before and sharing his views at Arab-American community...

Democrats and the media have accuses Tea Party favorite Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) of "McCarthyism" merely for posing tough questions to and about Chuck Hagel during the latter's confirmation as Secretary of Defense. Yet a recent column by former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich reveals who the real McCarthyites are in U.S. politics today, as Reich likens the Tea Party to a conspiracy "to undermine the government of the United States." Reich, who has steadfastly supported President Barack Obama's big-government, tax-and-spend agenda, wrote that the Tea Party had "infiltrated" the government at every level, and had used the budget cuts...

Republicans and Democrats are blaming one another for impending cuts to the defense budget brought about by sequestration. But with serial annual deficits of $1 trillion-plus and an aggregate debt nearing $17 trillion, the United States -- like an insolvent Rome and exhausted Great Britain of the past -- was bound to re-examine its expensive overseas commitments and strategic profile. The president's nomination of Chuck Hagel for defense secretary was a sort of Zen-like way of having a Republican combat veteran orchestrate a reduced military. In fact, Barack Obama has nurtured a broad and diverse constituency for his neo-isolationist vision....

On her MSNBC show today, Andrea Mitchell accused Republicans of "red-baiting" Chuck Hagel, a reference to tactics most notably associated with the McCarthy period during which people were accused [often accurately, it should be noted] of Communist or affiliated sympathies. Such cries of McCarthyism have of course become standard liberal fare when it comes to Hagel's confirmation process. View the video here.

LTC West interviews General Boykin on national defense issues.