The inspector general calls the rate "abnormal." Read more»

A report by the Joint Chiefs of Staff says that both military and civilian officials failed to tackle corrosive corruption in Afghanistan. Read more»

On a dozen occasions over the past decade, National Security Agency employees misused their incredible eavesdropping powers for the most trivial of personal reasons: They snooped on girlfriends, husbands, wives or others of personal interest, actions that later provoked discipline or retirements but no criminal penalties. Read more»

Detective work in Syria that was completed this week has allowed UN investigators to document some of the world’s worst suspicions. They found that a deadly rocket slammed into the second floor of an apartment building in the Damascus suburb known as Moadamiyah in the early morning hours on Aug. 21. There, the warhead sheared off, spreading a gas that quickly killed those who lived inside. Read more»

President Obama disclosed in Berlin on June 19 that he has ordered the Pentagon to revise its plan for targeting America’s arsenal of nuclear weapons in wartime, a decision that opens the door to negotiated reductions in all three categories of these devastating weapons: strategic or long-range; tactical — meaning those deployed in Europe; and the large U.S. inventory of bombs and warheads held in reserve. Read more»

Pentagon officials have been warning that budget cuts will provoke a “hollowing out” of warfighting capabilities in coming years, with tens of billions of dollars on the table under so-called “sequestration” cuts. Somehow, however, there is still enough money to pay for the construction of some new sun rooms for military housing used by senior officers in Stuttgart, Germany, a country the U.S. military has begun to flee. Read more»

The Obama administration will propose a deep cut in funding for nuclear nonproliferation programs at the Energy Department largely so it can boost the department’s spending to modernize its stockpile of nuclear weapons, according to officials familiar with the proposed 2014 federal budget to be unveiled Wednesday. Read more»

If anyone thought Chuck Hagel wants to be a caretaker defense secretary, he worked hard to disabuse them of the idea in an April 3 speech to a roomful of generals and other senior officers at Washington’s National Defense University, an elite school chartered by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Read more»

The cold reality, as spelled out in a recent Government Accountability Office (GAO) report, is that the Pentagon’s use of competitively-bid contracts has been declining steadily for the past five years and last year stood at just 57 percent of its total contract spending. In fiscal year 2008, it was 62.6 percent. Read more»

A new U.S. intelligence report forecasts an end to U.S. predominance. Read more» 1

The U.S. government is unable to “account for $201 million” worth of fuel purchases for the Afghan Army, according to a special report by a government watchdog on Dec. 20. Read more»

Billions have been spent on FEMA's urban security program but no one knows if it produced any appreciable new security. Read more»

The Pentagon’s budget is almost assuredly going down in coming years, but it looks like a specific type of weaponry, the nation’s stockpile of nuclear warheads, is also headed down, with Barack Obama’s reelection. Read more»

President Obama and Congress now have just over seven weeks to reach an agreement on the federal budget that would avert a round of automatic tax hikes and spending cuts in defense and social programs that members of both parties have depicted as draconian. Read more»

Presidential candidates compete in debates to show how muscular they are on foreign policy, even when clear solutions are often not available. Closely-fought presidential campaigns can confound expectations by constricting—rather than broadening—public debate about significant issues. Read more»