History > 2006 > USA > Pentagon (II)

U.S. military sees

Iran's nuke bomb 5 years away

Published August 31, 2006
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
By Rowan Scarborough

The U.S. military is operating under the assumption that Iran is five to eight years away from being able to build its first nuclear weapon, a time span that explains a general lack of urgency within the Bush administration to use air strikes to disable Tehran's atomic program.

Defense sources familiar with discussions of senior military commanders say the five- to eight-year projection has been discussed inside the Pentagon, which is updating its war plan for Iran. The time frame is generally in line with last year's intelligence community estimate that Iran could have the capability to produce a nuclear weapon by the beginning or middle of the next decade.

But the sources said that while the five-year window provides President Bush additional time to decide on whether to launch military strikes, they suspect it underestimates Iran's determination to build a bomb as quickly as possible.

Iran faces a United Nations Security Council deadline today to stop enriching uranium or face economic sanctions.

Advocates of stopping Iran's nuclear ambitions point to gaps in what the U.S. intelligence community really knows about Iran's secretive process. They also point to the fact that Iraq was much closer to building the bomb than the U.S. thought in 1991, when Operation Desert Storm air strikes destroyed much of Baghdad's atomic capability.

Some of this impatience was revealed in a bipartisan report Aug. 23 from the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. The report, which dealt with Iran's support for terrorism and quest for weapons of mass destruction, chastised the U.S. intelligence community for not devoting sufficient resources to Tehran. It also indirectly criticized current intelligence reporting on Iran as too timid.

"An important dimension of the detection of Iran's WMD program is how intelligence analysts use intelligence to characterize these programs in their analysis," the report said. "Intelligence community managers and analysts must provide their best analytic judgments about Iranian WMD programs and not shy away from provocative conclusions or bury disagreements in consensus assessments."

Concerning intelligence resources for Iran, the report said, "The national security community must dedicate the personnel and resources necessary to better assess Iran's plans, capabilities and intentions, and the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) must identify, establish, and report on intelligence goals and performance metrics to measure progress on critical fronts."

Retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney, a prominent proponent in Washington of air strikes against Iran, said that whether the estimate is five years or 10 years, the time span instills complacency in war planning. He said that Mr. Bush is now following the State Department's diplomatic path, without a clear policy.

"Everyone is in the Jergens lotion mode -- 'woe is me.' Wringing our hands," the former fighter pilot said.

Gen. McInerney advocates using B-2 stealth bombers, cruise missiles and jet fighters to conduct a one- or two-day bombing campaign to take out Iran's air defenses, military facilities and about 40 nuclear targets, which includes a Russian-built reactor and an enrichment plant.

The Washington Times has previously reported that Israel has drafted plans for air strikes using long-range versions of the F-15 and F-16 fighters. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has often threatened to destroy Israel, which is within range of Iran's Shahab-3 ballistic missile.

The Times also reported that U.S. Central Command is updating a target list for Iran.

The House report said Iran owns the largest ballistic missile arsenal in the Middle East, and is also working on a missile re-entry vehicle that could carry a nuclear warhead.

    U.S. military sees Iran's nuke bomb 5 years away, WT, 31.8.2006, http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20060831-121633-7741r.htm

Rumsfeld Sees Some Progress in Missile Plan

August 28, 2006
The New York Times
By DAVID S. CLOUD

FORT GREELY, Alaska, Aug. 27 — Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld said here Sunday that while the fledgling United States ballistic missile defense system was becoming more capable, he wanted to see a successful full-scale test before declaring it able to shoot down a ballistic missile.

“I have a lot of confidence in these folks, and I have a lot of confidence in the work that’s been done,” Mr. Rumsfeld said after touring one of the system’s two interceptor sites. But he added that he wanted to see a test “where we actually put all the pieces together; that just hasn’t happened.”

Mr. Rumsfeld’s assessment was more cautious than that of the Missile Defense Agency director, Lt. Gen. Henry A. Obering III of the Air Force. General Obering said recently that he was confident the system could have shot down a ballistic missile test-fired July 4 by North Korea, if it had been a live attack aimed at the United States. The two-stage rocket broke up shortly after launching and fell into the Sea of Japan.

The Bush administration has taken the unusual step of deploying the system, which is designed to shoot down a limited number of missiles, before testing is completed and before all the radars and sensors necessary to track incoming missiles are in place. Mr. Rumsfeld repeated Sunday that the system was aimed at protecting against attacks from North Korea and Iran, which he called “rogue states that are intent on developing long-range ballistic missiles.”

The first flight test of the American system in more than a year, involving the firing of an interceptor at a target, is planned for this week, but it is not the sort of full-blown trial Mr. Rumsfeld meant.

The goal this week is to see if sensors in the so-called kill vehicle can recognize an incoming warhead, not to actually hit it, General Obering said. A test in which the kill vehicle is supposed to hit the target warhead is planned for later this year, he said.

But General Obering said that this week’s test was “about as realistic as you can get” because it employed a target that in its size and speed was representative of missiles that might be fired at the United States.

In the last two flight tests, the system halted the firing sequence before the interceptor missile left its silo. General Obering said those setbacks were due to “minor glitches” in software and workmanship by contractors that had “nothing to do with the functionality of the system.”

Even so, after the second failed test in February 2005, the system was taken down until December.

On his tour of Fort Greely, a remote base 100 miles from Fairbanks, Mr. Rumsfeld climbed down a ladder into an underground silo containing one of the 10 54-foot-long interceptor missiles already deployed. Another of the three-stage missiles is scheduled to be put in the ground on Monday, officials said, and as many as 40 are supposed to be installed by next year. The other interceptor site is at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, where two interceptors are in silos.

Once the sensors detect an incoming missile and the interceptor is launched, it flies 18,635 miles an hour until the kill vehicle separates from its missile and, if it works correctly, flies into the incoming one, destroying it.

The Bush administration is also looking at locations for an interceptor site in Europe that would protect the United States and parts of Europe from missiles launched from the Middle East. The administration is seeking $126 million this year to build the site and the interceptors, which could be in place in four years if Congress provides the money, General Obering said.

Later in the day, Mr. Rumsfeld met in Fairbanks with Sergei Ivanov, the defense minister of Russia, which has long been wary of the American antimissile system, fearing it could be expanded into a more robust shield that would threaten the strategic balance between the United States and Russia.

Mr. Ivanov did not directly criticize the American system, but he called for “transparency” by the Bush administration, a term meant to convey Russia’s concern about any modifications to the system that could take its capabilities beyond stopping a small number of missiles.

    Rumsfeld Sees Some Progress in Missile Plan, NYT, 28.8.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/28/washington/28missile.html?hp&ex=1156824000&en=cab05342ea77c57f&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Some parts of military still hostile to gays

Sun Aug 6, 2006 9:47 AM ET
Reuters
By Kristin Roberts

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Gays in the U.S. military face regular hostility on some bases and ships where commanders fail to prohibit harassment more than a decade after the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" law was enacted, although seeds of greater tolerance may be taking root, advocates and witnesses report.

While some leaders have created environments where harassment is not tolerated, others have not and the evidence, according to witnesses, is both verbal and visual.

On the Navy's USS Theodore Roosevelt aircraft carrier, for example, anti-gay statements and jokes are on display and have been incorporated into a video about the F-14 Tomcat fighter aircraft, recently shown to reporters on the carrier.

Pilots on the Roosevelt sported T-shirts, also shown to reporters including this Reuters correspondent, that said, "I'm a Tomcat guy and you're a homo." The commander of the fighter squadron, in fact, wore the shirt.

"The line between that and threats and violence can be quite thin," said Aaron Belkin, director of the Center for the Study of Sexual Minorities in the Military at the University of California-Santa Barbara.

Openly gay people are prohibited from serving in the U.S. military under a 1993 law known as "Don't Ask, Don't Tell." The military can't ask if a service member is gay, but those who say they are gay are discharged.

The U.S. military argues that banning gays from the military is critical to maintaining a unit's "cohesion," the trust among service members crucial to combat effectiveness.

Harassment of gays, however, is prohibited. The Pentagon, in a 2000 memo to the armed services and commanders, said "mistreatment, harassment and inappropriate comments or gestures" based on sexual orientation were not acceptable.

That followed a report from the Defense Department's inspector general that found 80 percent of service members surveyed had heard anti-gay comments and 37 percent had witnessed harassment against people thought to be homosexual.

CHANGING ENVIRONMENT?

The anti-gay displays aboard the Roosevelt should be seen as harassment, said Steve Ralls, communications director for the Service members Legal Defense Network, a group working to see the Don't Ask, Don't Tell law repealed.

"That type of behavior has real consequences," Ralls said, pointing to the anti-gay graffiti allowed at Fort Campbell in Kentucky before the 1999 murder of Pfc. Barry Winchell, thought to be a gay soldier.

In response to questions from Reuters, Navy Rear Admiral Denby Starling, commander of the Naval Air Force, U.S. Atlantic Fleet, said the anti-gay messages witnessed on the Roosevelt were "contrary to Navy policy and core values and have no place within Naval Aviation or the Navy."

"Immediately upon notification of your observations, Naval Aviation leadership engaged to take corrective action," he said in an e-mail. "Steps have been taken to ensure that the offending messages have been removed. Squadron and air wing leadership have been counseled regarding the inappropriate tone set by such messages and poor judgment demonstrated in allowing their display."

Starling said other steps would be taken and the incident would be used to reinforce policy across the force.

The University of California's Belkin said his research shows attitudes against allowing openly gay people to serve may be changing, especially among younger service members.

But he said pressure to conform in an organization that places heavy value on tradition could inhibit change, noting servicemen may be "socialized to act anti-gay."

The military has dismissed more than 11,000 people for Don't Ask, Don't Tell violations, Ralls said. According to the Pentagon's latest data, 726 people were dismissed in fiscal 2005, representing 0.3 percent of all discharges that year.

Derek Sparks was discharged in 2002 after 14 years in the Navy when he admitted he was gay amid an investigation into alleged homosexual activity. He denied committing the acts.

The former sailor, part of a group of plaintiffs in a suit against the Defense Department, said anti-gay remarks were tolerated in the Navy throughout his career. He hid his homosexuality because he wanted to serve, he said.

"I loved serving and I loved being in the military so much that it was a sacrifice I was willing to make," Sparks said.

    Some parts of military still hostile to gays, R, 6.8.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyID=2006-08-06T134719Z_01_N04465611_RTRUKOC_0_US-RIGHTS-MILITARY-GAYS.xml&WTmodLoc=Home-C5-domesticNews-2

Editorial

The Sound of One Domino Falling

August 4, 2006
The New York Times

It’s been obvious for years that Donald Rumsfeld is in denial of reality, but the defense secretary now also seems stuck in a time warp. You could practically hear the dominoes falling as he told the Senate Armed Services Committee yesterday that it was dangerous for Americans to even talk about how to end the war in Iraq.

“If we left Iraq prematurely,” he said, “the enemy would tell us to leave Afghanistan and then withdraw from the Middle East. And if we left the Middle East, they’d order us and all those who don’t share their militant ideology to leave what they call the occupied Muslim lands from Spain to the Philippines.” And finally, he intoned, America will be forced “to make a stand nearer home.”

No one in charge of American foreign affairs has talked like that in decades. After Vietnam, of course, the communist empire did not swarm all over Asia as predicted; it tottered and collapsed. And the new “enemy” that Mr. Rumsfeld is worried about is not a worldwide conspiracy but a collection of disparate political and religious groups, now united mainly by American action in Iraq.

Americans are frightened by the growing chaos in the Mideast, and the last thing they needed to hear this week was Mr. Rumsfeld laying blame for sectarian violence on a few Al Qaeda schemers. What they want is some assurance that the administration has a firm grasp on reality and has sensible, achievable goals that could lead to an end to the American involvement in Iraq with as little long-term damage as possible. Instead, Mr. Rumsfeld offered the same old exhortation to stay the course, without the slightest hint of what the course is, other than the rather obvious point that the Iraqis have to learn to run their own country.

By contrast, the generals flanking him were pillars of candor and practicality. Gen. John Abizaid, the U.S. commander in the Middle East, said “Iraq could move toward civil war” if the sectarian violence — which he said “is probably as bad as I’ve seen it” — is not contained. The generals tried to be optimistic about the state of the Iraqi security forces, but it was hard. They had to acknowledge that a militia controls Basra, that powerful Iraqi government officials run armed bands that the Pentagon considers terrorist organizations financed by Iran, and that about a third of the Iraqi police force can’t be trusted to fight on the right side.

As for Mr. Rumsfeld, he suggested that lawmakers just leave everything up to him and the military command and stop talking about leaving Iraq. “We should consider how our words can be used by our deadly enemy,” he said.

Americans who once expected the Pentagon to win the war in Iraq have now been reduced to waiting for an indication that at least someone is minding the store. They won’t be comforted to hear Mr. Rumsfeld fretting about protecting Spain from Muslim occupation.

    The Sound of One Domino Falling, NYT, 4.8.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/04/opinion/04fri1.html

Sen. Clinton calls for Rumsfeld's resignation

Fri Aug 4, 2006 1:54 AM ET
Reuters

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - New York Democratic Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton on Thursday called on Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to resign, after accusing him of "presiding over a failed policy in Iraq."

Clinton's spokesman confirmed the senator said President George W. Bush should accept Rumsfeld's resignation.

Clinton, a possible 2008 Democratic presidential candidate, at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing earlier in the day, ripped into Rumsfeld for his handling of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

"We hear a lot of happy talk and rosy scenarios, but because of the administration's strategic blunders and, frankly, the record of incompetence in executing, you are presiding over a failed policy," Clinton said.

"Given your track record, Secretary Rumsfeld, why should we believe your assurances now?" she asked him in a tense exchange.

Iraq is caught in the worst sectarian violence yet seen and faces the threat of civil war, two of the United States' senior generals said on Thursday, three years after the invasion.

"Sectarian violence probably is as bad as I've seen it, in Baghdad in particular," Army Gen. John Abizaid, the head of U.S. Central Command, told the Senate hearing. "If not stopped, it is possible that Iraq could move toward civil war."

Marine Corps Gen. Peter Pace, the most senior U.S. military officer, also said there was a "possibility" of civil war in Iraq, where the violence has claimed about 100 lives a day.

While a number of Democrats have called for Rumsfeld's resignation, Clinton until now had stopped short of that.

Rumsfeld had planned to skip the committee hearing and instead hold a closed briefing with the full Senate, until Clinton publicly called on him to testify in the open forum.

She argued that senators and the American people "should hear directly from the top civilian leader at the Pentagon, the person most responsible for implementing the president's military policy in Iraq and Afghanistan."

In his opening statement, Rumsfeld thanked the committee for inviting him to testify, and added, "Senator Clinton, thank you for seconding the motion."

    Sen. Clinton calls for Rumsfeld's resignation, R, 4.8.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=politicsNews&storyID=2006-08-04T055421Z_01_N03285395_RTRUKOC_0_US-IRAQ-RUMSFELD-CLINTON.xml&WTmodLoc=NewsArt-L3-Politics+NewsNews-2

Rumsfeld, in reversal, to attend public hearing

Wed Aug 2, 2006 10:47 PM ET
Reuters
By Will Dunham and Vicki Allen

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - In a reversal, the Pentagon on Wednesday said Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld will testify publicly on the Iraq war to a key Senate committee after Democrats blasted him for planning to bypass it because of a busy schedule.

Earlier in the day, Rumsfeld told reporters he would not attend a morning Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, but would have a closed briefing for all senators along with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and two generals later on Thursday.

Sen. Hillary Clinton, a New York Democrat who led the charge against Rumsfeld, called his "11th hour decision to reverse course ... the right one."

She said senators and the American people "should hear directly from the top civilian leader at the Pentagon, the person most responsible for implementing the President's military policy in Iraq and Afghanistan."

Rumsfeld, known for frosty relations with some lawmakers, had denied he was reluctant to face senators in public, and suggested critics were playing politics.

Democrats, trying to regain control of Congress from Republicans in elections in November, have made Rumsfeld a prime target of criticism over the handling of the three-year-old Iraq war.

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada fired off a letter to Majority Leader Bill Frist of Tennessee urging him to call on Rumsfeld to appear in the open hearing.

Rumsfeld has not testified publicly to the Armed Services Committee since February. Instead of Rumsfeld, Army Gen. John Abizaid, head of U.S. Central Command, and Marine Corps Gen. Peter Pace, the top U.S. military officer, were set to testify.

Virginia Republican Sen. John Warner, the committee's chairman, and the panel's top Democrat wrote Rumsfeld on July 26 "to confirm your invitation to testify" at the hearing on operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Warner said on Wednesday "at no time did he refuse to come up here," adding the Senate Republican leadership preferred having Rumsfeld, Rice, Pace and Abizaid brief in private.

At the Pentagon, Rumsfeld said that "my calendar was such that to do it in the morning ... would have been difficult."

Without mentioning anyone by name, Rumsfeld added, "Let's be honest. Politics enters into these things. And maybe the person raising the question is interested in that." Clinton is a possible 2008 Democratic presidential candidate.

Democrats have used these committee hearings to savage Rumsfeld. At a 2005 hearing, Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts asked Rumsfeld, "Isn't it time for you to resign?"

    Rumsfeld, in reversal, to attend public hearing, R, 2.8.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=politicsNews&storyID=2006-08-03T024710Z_01_N02279858_RTRUKOC_0_US-IRAQ-USA-RUMSFELD.xml&WTmodLoc=Home-C5-politicsNews-2

Army makes way for older soldiers

Posted 8/1/2006 11:49 PM ET
USA TODAY
By Tom Vanden Brook

FORT JACKSON, S.C. — The Army has begun training the oldest recruits in its history, the result of a concerted effort to fill ranks depleted during the Iraq war.

In June, five months after it raised the enlistment age limit from 35 to just shy of 40, the Army raised it to just under 42.

To accommodate the older soldiers, the Army has lowered the minimum physical requirements needed to pass basic training.

The first group of older recruits is going through basic training here. So far, only five people 40 and older — and 324 age 35 and older — have enlisted, Army records show.

The Army also hopes to attract more recruits by offering shorter active-duty periods for some recruits, signing bonuses and bonuses for soldiers who persuade others to join.

David Chu, undersecretary of Defense for personnel and readiness, says the improved health and fitness of middle-aged Americans makes it possible for them to enlist.

The Army has the military's highest age limit. The Air Force's and Marines' limits are 27, while the Navy's is 35.

Allowing older soldiers makes sense if done properly, says Loren Thompson, a military analyst at the Lexington Institute, a non-partisan think tank in Arlington, Va.

"For front-line combat troops, it's a bad idea," Thompson says. "But nobody is proposing putting 42-year-olds next to 18-year-olds on combat patrols. If it is correctly run, it could be a real boon."

The Army, which supplies most of the troops for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, is on track to meet its recruiting goal of 80,000 new soldiers this year.

In 2005, the Army missed its 80,000 goal by 8% when it recruited 73,373 new soldiers.

    Army makes way for older soldiers, UT, 1.8.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-08-01-army-age_x.htm

US general who oversaw detentions retires with honors

Tue Aug 1, 2006 3:12 AM ET
Reuters
By Will Dunham

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, who commanded the Guantanamo prison and helped shape detention practices at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, retired from the U.S. military on Monday with a top honor and praise from the Army.

Miller headed the prison camp for foreign terrorism suspects at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, from 2002 to 2004 and was sent to Iraq in 2003 to help extract more information from prisoners there. He oversaw all detention operations in Iraq for nine months in 2004.

Human rights activists have accused Miller of permitting widespread abuse of prisoners and of importing the harsh techniques used at Guantanamo to Iraq. They contend that Miller's influence helped create the conditions for the sexual humiliation and abuse of Abu Ghraib prisoners.

"This is yet another case where you have somebody who is integrally involved in setting the stage for abuse -- implementing tactics that people are now being prosecuted for -- and rather than being held accountable, he's getting honors," said Amnesty International official Jumana Musa.

Military investigators last year recommended that Miller be admonished for failing to monitor and limit the "abusive and degrading" interrogation of a prisoner, but the general who headed U.S. Southern Command rejected the recommendation.

The Army inspector general's office also cleared Miller.

This year, Miller initially invoked his right not to incriminate himself in the trials of two U.S. soldiers charged with abusing Abu Ghraib prisoners with dogs.

He later did testify in one trial, telling jurors in May he never suggested using military dogs in interrogations. The soldier, who had sought to show that top officers were responsible for the abuse, was convicted.

During a ceremony presided over by Gen. Richard Cody, the Army's No. 2 officer, Miller was presented with the Distinguished Service Medal, the Army's fourth-highest award, before a crowd of 200 people in the Pentagon's Hall of Heroes.

Cody called Miller a "role model, innovator and leader" who was asked to "tackle two of the toughest jobs in the global war on terror."

The Army said Miller has agreed to testify before Congress about detainee issues if he is asked.

    US general who oversaw detentions retires with honors, R, 31.7.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=politicsNews&storyID=2006-08-01T071211Z_01_N31362465_RTRUKOC_0_US-SECURITY-GUANTANAMO-GENERAL.xml&WTmodLoc=Home-C5-politicsNews-3

Antimissile Weapon

U.S. and Israel Shelved Laser as a Defense

July 30, 2006
The New York Times
By WILLIAM J. BROAD

Ten years ago, in a preview of the current Middle East crisis, Hezbollah guerrillas fired hundreds of Katyusha rockets into Israel. The attacks prompted President Bill Clinton and the Israeli prime minister, Shimon Peres, to agree to develop a futuristic laser meant to destroy the rockets in flight.

But last September, after spending more than $300 million, the United States and Israel quietly shelved the experimental weapon, mainly because of its bulkiness, high costs and poor anticipated results on the battlefield.

“Frankly, its performance was not great,” said Penrose C. Albright, a former Pentagon official who helped initiate the project. “Under certain conditions you can make it work. But under salvo or cloudy conditions, you’ve got problems. In northern Israel, about 30 percent of the time, you’ve got a cloud deck.”

He and other military experts say the aborted project is a case study in the challenges of building antimissile weapons and the consequences of failure. Today, northern Israel remains defenseless against the Katyushas and other small rockets.

The project to build an anti-Katyusha shield, called the tactical high energy laser, was approved by the United States and Israel in April 1996. The next month, a California contractor, TRW, won an $89 million contract to design, build and test the laser in just 22 months. Aided by Israel and the United States Army, TRW worked hard at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico to make the novel idea come to life.

Skeptics on Capitol Hill faulted the effort from the start, calling it seductive but doomed because of the would-be weapon’s size, complexity and vulnerability to enemy attack.

“It was a sitting duck,” recalled Subrata Ghoshroy, who studied the project in 1996 for the House International Relations Committee and now analyzes military issues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The rupture of its fuel tanks, he said, would have produced clouds of corrosive acid, endangering defenders as well as nearby civilians.

Roughly the size of six city buses, the prototype weapon was made up of modules that held a command center, radar and a telescope for tracking targets, the chemical laser itself, tanks to feed it tons of fuel and a rotating mirror to bounce its beam toward speeding targets.

As often happens in the federal development of death rays, parts failed and costs soared. A March 1999 report by the General Accounting Office found that valves leaked, releasing toxic fluids, and that the laser’s test schedule was slipping.

“Technical problems and their associated program delays,” the Congressional investigators said, “demonstrate the complex nature of developing laser weapons.”

In June 2000, more than two years behind schedule, the laser flashed to life at White Sands and succeeded in destroying an armed Katyusha in flight. Soon, it shot down two dozen more rockets, though military officials say its testers never challenged its sensors and laser beam with more than two Katyushas at a time.

Pentagon officials praised the effort as the first with the potential to turn flashing beams of concentrated light into a weapon suitable for antimissile defense. Contractors hailed the laser’s ability to defeat salvo launchings. But the system was ultimately judged as too costly, feeble and unwieldy for battlefield use.

Yiftah S. Shapir, a military analyst at the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University, said one guerrilla with a rocket launcher could fire 40 Katyushas in less than a minute, easily overwhelming most any defense.

He added that shooting the laser just once would have cost roughly $3,000, and that “protecting the whole border of Israel would have required a few dozen of these systems,” their cost running to billions of dollars.

David Siegel, a spokesman for the Israeli Embassy in Washington, said, “The program was terminated because of its prohibitive costs.”

Some politicians have criticized the decision. Yuval Steinitz, a Likud member and former chairman of the Foreign and Defense Committee of the Israeli Parliament, called the move shortsighted. “It was a serious mistake for Israel not to give top priority to efforts to create rocket and short-missile defenses,’’ he said.

Dr. Albright, the former Pentagon official, now an analyst at Civitas Group, a defense consulting and investment firm in Washington, said the decade-long effort to develop the laser weapon had an unhappy moral.

“There’s not much you can do against rockets,” he said, “except control the launch area or go into shelters.”

Today, the experimental laser sits in storage, its maintenance costing more than $1 million a year, said Scott McPheeters, an Army official in charge of the project at the Aviation and Missile Command.

    U.S. and Israel Shelved Laser as a Defense, NYT, 30.7.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/30/world/middleeast/30laser.html?ref=middleeast

After 4 Decades, a Cold War Symbol Stands Down

July 29, 2006
The New York Times
By KIRK JOHNSON

DENVER, July 28 — Few symbols of the cold war carry the clanging, into-the-bunker resonance of Cheyenne Mountain, home of the North American Aerospace Defense Command, better known as Norad.

The mountain, about 80 miles south of here on the Front Range, was carved out in the 1960’s to house the early warning system for nuclear war, and its accouterments and image became the stuff of a whole generation’s anxieties.

But those anxieties shifted after the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990’s and even more after Sept. 11, and on Friday military officials in Colorado announced that Norad’s day-to-day operations would be consolidated, for purposes of efficiency, in an ordinary building at Peterson Air Force Base in nearby Colorado Springs.

The mountain will be kept only as a backup, though fully operational and staffed with support personnel — a place of secure retreat should the need again arise, a military spokesman said.

“The threat has changed,” said Michael Kucharek, chief of media relations for Norad and the United States Northern Command. The decision, Mr. Kucharek said, was intended to make civil defense more “nimble, adaptive and effective.”

Nimble was probably never a word associated with Cheyenne Mountain.

Twenty-five-ton steel doors guard a windowless and secret world that would be, its designers said, impregnable to the worst thing imaginable. And the mountain in turn created a place and a setting — if only in the public imagination — where the worst might well play out.

A teenager played by Matthew Broderick hacked into the mountain’s computers and brought the world to the brink of destruction in the movie “WarGames.’’ Science-fiction writers imagined post-apocalyptic societies inherited by Cheyenne-Mountain-like warrior-survivors. Dr. Strangelove haunted a similar war room at the fevered brink of disaster.

The cold war threat, and the philosophy that arose around it, were premised on the idea of a centralized, command-down enemy — the Soviet Union — and a centralized, command-down national defense to counter that enemy, historians and military experts said.

The technology of the time dovetailed with the goals of “hardening,” as it was called, and burrowing down — in Cheyenne Mountain’s case under 2,000 feet of granite. The centralized mainframe computer was the model then, too. And just as the old Soviet threat has been supplanted by the shadow world of global terrorism, so too has the mainframe been thrust aside by the modern notion of decentralized networks that can be better defended by being dispersed.

“Cheyenne represented the idea that there would be this one single nerve center where man and machines are meshed together to fight the apocalypse,” said W. Patrick McCray, a professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who teaches a course on the history of the atomic age.

“It indicates how much fear, but also nuclear weapons in general, infiltrated all aspects of American society during that time,” Professor McCray said. “Here’s this very physical representation of the determination to fight and win a nuclear war.”

The Northern Command, which was created in 2002 to monitor newer kinds of terrorist-era threats to the nation — from land and sea to cyberspace — is already based at Peterson, Mr. Kucharek said, and its role has grown rapidly. The consolidation adds Norad’s focus on missile defense to Peterson’s broader portfolio.

About 230 people involved in day-to-day Norad operations will transfer to Peterson, Mr. Kucharek said, with no net loss of jobs, but with an undetermined cost-saving over time. Two other military units connected to Norad, employing about 200 people, are also considering moves out of the mountain, consolidating their functions at other bases around the country, he said.

Cheyenne Mountain was never designed as a place to wage war, but rather as one for warning and defense — to coordinate the net of sensors, satellites and spies that would send the alarm, said Gen. William E. Odom, who was director of the National Security Agency from 1981 to 1985 and is now a professor of political science at Yale University.

Decisions to launch or counterstrike missiles were concentrated at Strategic Air Command near Omaha, General Odom said.

“Their job was to assemble the data that would wake up the president at 3 a.m. and say the country is under nuclear attack,” he said of Cheyenne Mountain.

General Odom said he had visited the mountain many times in his career and that it was a fairly unglamorous place of charts and maps. According to the Norad Web site, four-and-a-half acres of connected chambers and tunnels were dug out for the complex. Fifteen free-standing buildings, each two or three stories tall, were built underground as offices. Metal walls and tunnels were designed to withstand an electromagnetic pulse from a nuclear ignition, or an earthquake.

The pop culture imagery that came to be associated with Cheyenne Mountain, General Odom said, became for many people much more powerful and real than the workaday national defense activities that actually happened there.

Of the changes announced Friday, he said, “People producing movies will have to come up with a new image — I think that’s really the significance.”

As for defense and warning against surprise attack, the need is just as crucial today, General Odom said, but different.

“This is just rearranging the furniture, this is not closing the house down,” he said.

    After 4 Decades, a Cold War Symbol Stands Down, NYT, 29.7.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/29/washington/29norad.html?hp&ex=1154232000&en=549eaa636fcd0591&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Army Plans to End Contentious Halliburton Logistics Pact and Split Work Among Companies

July 13, 2006
The New York Times
By JAMES GLANZ

BAGHDAD, Iraq, July 12 — The Army plans to terminate and restructure a lucrative and enormously contentious logistics contract that has paid a single company, Halliburton, more than $15 billion to do jobs like deliver food and fuel and construct housing for American troops around the world since late 2001.

The changes, described in draft contracting documents on Army Web sites, await final Pentagon approval, said Linda K. Theis, a spokeswoman for the Army Field Support Command in Rock Island, Ill., which oversees the contract. But they have already received extensive review and are moving through the upper echelons of the Army, she said.

If the plans are carried through, Halliburton’s contract will end, and the tasks it does will be divided among as many as four companies. One company will be an umbrella for planning and oversight, and the others will compete for the actual job orders — things like building camps and delivering fuel in war zones.

The Army said it hoped this approach would foster competition and lower the risks of having one large contractor in charge of critical military programs. Critics of the exclusive, no-bid contract, including Representative Henry A. Waxman, a California Democrat, say it has allowed Halliburton to charge unreasonably high costs for some work. They have often pointed to the deal with Halliburton, which was led by Dick Cheney before he quit to become vice president, as an example of cronyism by the Bush administration in awarding lucrative contracts.

Halliburton has dismissed those criticisms, and the Army has largely upheld its claimed costs for its work. Much of the criticism has been over work and billing by KBR, the Halliburton subsidiary once known as Kellogg Brown & Root.The Washington Post reported Wednesday that Halliburton’s contract would be ended.

Melissa Norcross, a Halliburton spokeswoman, called the proposed changes “neither unusual nor unexpected,” because earlier versions of the logistics contract had gone through the same process. The Halliburton contract could have run for 10 years, but the Army has the option of ending it after an annual review.

Ms. Theis said that when Halliburton’s logistics contract was awarded, the Army expected that it would be worth around $100 million over 10 years. But that was before the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq scattered the American military, with its vast logistical requirements, around the world.

When asked what role the widespread criticism of Halliburton’s work had played in generating the proposed changes, the Army replied, “None.” The shift was driven only by the surging logistics needs of the American military, the Army said.

But Frederick D. Barton, co-director of the postconflict reconstruction project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said he doubted that the waves of criticism could have been missed in the Army’s reviews. Because so much work went to one company for so long, the Army might have a hard time finding others with the capacity to carry the load now, he said.

“There are not competitors with warehouses full of talent sitting around waiting for this assignment,” Mr. Barton said.

    Army Plans to End Contentious Halliburton Logistics Pact and Split Work Among Companies, NYT, 13.7.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/13/washington/13halliburton.html

Army reshapes training to spare enlistees the boot

Updated 7/13/2006 12:04 AM ET
USA TODAY
By Tom Vanden Brook

WASHINGTON — The Army has slashed the rate at which young soldiers wash out, allowing it to keep more of the recruits it has struggled to find.
That's due largely to changes in how the Army treats enlistees. Gone are the days when trainees run 'til they drop. Soldiers who need counseling get extra attention, not a screaming drill sergeant.

The attrition rate within the soldier's first six months plummeted from 18.1% in May 2005 to today's rate of 7.6%. Last year the Army, which supplies most of the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, missed its recruiting goal of 80,000 soldiers; it's on track to meet this year's goal, also 80,000.

It made sense to change basic training, because the Army relies more on technology skills than brute strength, said Michael O'Hanlon, a military analyst at the Brookings Institution. "If you're losing good people with those skills because of lack of physical prowess, that's not a good thing."

Lt. Col. Bryan Hilferty, an Army spokesman at the Pentagon, said the approach began in 2003 and was re-emphasized in 2005, after the Army fell behind its recruiting goals. Soldiers who fail tests are often retrained instead of run out of the Army, he said.

"You'll get guys who have never run a mile," Hilferty said of some recruits. "Rather than throw them out, we said, 'Let's change the training so we don't injure them.' "

The Army's also made training more relevant to today's fight, said Harvey Perritt, a spokesman for the Army's Training and Doctrine Command at Fort Monroe, Va. Young soldiers spend three weeks in the field compared with three days a few years ago. They get issued an M-16 rifle on their second day, not in the third week as in the past. And they carry it everywhere, from the chow hall to the bathroom.

James Martin, an expert on military culture at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, said the changes make sense but stressed that the Army needs to guard against graduating substandard soldiers.

"Will you have people causing you problems later on?" Martin said. "That would occur if you lowered that standard at the end of training period."

    Army reshapes training to spare enlistees the boot, UT, 13.7.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-07-12-army-training_x.htm

Editorial

The Rule of Law: Recognizing the Power of the Courts, Finally

July 12, 2006
The New York Times

We were pleased to see the Defense Department finally recognize the power of the Supreme Court over prisoners of the military and order the armed forces to follow the Geneva Conventions requirement of decent treatment for all prisoners, even terrorism suspects. It was a real step forward for an administration that tossed aside the Geneva rules years ago and then tried to place itself beyond the reach of the courts.

However, the Pentagon memo released yesterday claimed, falsely, that its prisoner policies already generally complied with the Geneva Conventions — the sole exception being the military commissions created by President Bush and struck down by the high court. That disingenuousness may have simply been an attempt to save face. If so, it was distressing but ultimately not all that significant. What really matters is that Congress bring the military prisons back under the rule of law, and create military tribunals for terrorism suspects that will meet the requirements of the Constitution and the Geneva Conventions.

The other thing that really matters is that the White House actually agrees to obey the law this time.

Yesterday, the Senate Judiciary Committee held the first of three hearings scheduled this week on this issue, and the early results were mixed. Most of the senators, including key Republicans, said they were committed to drafting legislation that did more than merely rubber-stamp the way Mr. Bush decided to set up Guantánamo Bay.

The government’s witnesses, including top lawyers from the Justice and Defense Departments, seemed most interested in arguing that the military commissions were legal. They argued for what would be the worst possible outcome: that Congress just approve what Mr. Bush did and enact exceptions to the Geneva Conventions.

But Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift of the Navy, who represented Salim Ahmed Hamdan, the prisoner whose case was before the Supreme Court, provided damning evidence about how utterly flawed those commissions were — from military prosecutors. He quoted one, Capt. John Carr of the Air Force (since promoted to major), who condemned “a halfhearted and disorganized effort by a skeleton group of relatively inexperienced attorneys to prosecute fairly low-level accused in a process that appears to be rigged.”

The administration has professed its allegiance to the humane treatment of prisoners and to the rule of law before. But repairing the constitutional balance of powers and America’s profoundly damaged global image demand more than lip service.

    The Rule of Law: Recognizing the Power of the Courts, Finally, NYT, 12.7.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/12/opinion/12weds1.html

Military Lawyers Prepare to Speak on Guantánamo

July 11, 2006
The New York Times
By NEIL A. LEWIS

WASHINGTON, July 10 — Four years ago, the military’s most senior uniformed lawyers found their objections brushed aside when the Bush administration formulated plans for military commissions at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. This week, their concerns will get a public hearing as Congress takes up the question of whether to resurrect the tribunals struck down by the Supreme Court.

“We’re at a crossroads now,” said John D. Hutson, a retired rear admiral who was the top uniformed lawyer in the Navy until 2000 and who has been part of a cadre of retired senior military lawyers who have filed briefs challenging the administration’s legal approach. “We can finally get on the right side of the law and have a system that will pass Supreme Court and international scrutiny.”

Admiral Hutson, one of several current and former senior military lawyers who will testify this week before one of the three Congressional committees looking into the matter, plans to urge Congress to avoid trying to get around last month’s Supreme Court ruling.

Beginning shortly after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the military lawyers warned that the administration’s plan for military commissions put the United States on the wrong side of the law and of international standards. Most important, they warned, the arrangements could endanger members of the American military who might someday be captured by an enemy and treated like the detainees at Guantánamo.

But the lawyers’ sense of vindication at the Supreme Court’s 5-to-3 decision is tempered by growing anxiety over what may happen next. Several military lawyers, most of them retired, have said they are troubled by the possibility that Congress may restore the kind of system they have long argued against.

Donald J. Guter, another retired admiral who succeeded Admiral Hutson as the Navy’s top uniformed lawyer, said it would be a mistake for Congress to try to undo the Supreme Court ruling. Admiral Guter was one of several senior military judge advocates general, known as JAG’s, who after objecting to the planned military commissions found their advice pointedly unheeded.

“This was the concern all along of the JAG’s,” Admiral Guter said. “It’s a matter of defending what we always thought was the rule of law and proper behavior for civilized nations.”

One of the more intriguing hearings will be held Thursday as the current top military lawyers in the Navy, Army, Air Force and Marines testify before the Senate Armed Services Committee. The main issue at stake will be whether they express the same concerns of those out of uniform who have been critical of the administration’s approach.

Longstanding custom allows serving officers to give their own views at Congressional hearings if specifically asked, and some in the Senate expect the current uniformed lawyers to generally urge that Congress not stray far from the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the system that details court-martial proceedings.

Senator Bill Frist, the Republican leader, told reporters on Monday that he did not expect the Senate to take up any legislation on the issue until at least after the August recess of Congress.

The opportunity to rewrite the laws lies in the structure of the Supreme Court’s ruling, which emphasized that Congress had not explicitly approved deviations from ordinary court-martial proceedings or the Geneva Conventions.

The court majority said the military commissions as currently constituted were illegal because they did not have the same protections for the accused as do the military’s own justice system and court-martial proceedings. In addition, the court ruled that the commissions violated a part of the Geneva Conventions that provides for what it said was a minimum standard of due process in a civilized society.

In response, some legislators have said they will consider rewriting the law to make that part of the Geneva Conventions, known as Common Article 3, no longer applicable.

“We should be embracing Common Article 3 and shouting it from the rooftops,” Admiral Hutson said. “They can’t try to write us out of this, because that means every two-bit dictator could do the same.”

He said it was “unbecoming for America to have people say, ‘We’re going to try to work our way around this because we find it to be inconvenient.’ ”

“If you don’t apply it when it’s inconvenient,” he said, “it’s not a rule of law.”

Brig. Gen. David M. Brahms, a retired officer who was the chief uniformed lawyer for the Marine Corps, said he expected experienced military lawyers to try to persuade Congress that the law should not be changed to allow the military commissions to go forward with the procedures that the court found unlawful.

“Our central theme in all this has always been our great concern about reciprocity,” General Brahms said in an interview. “We don’t want someone saying they’ve got our folks as captives and we’re going to do to them exactly what you’ve done because we no longer hold any moral high ground.”

Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, which will hold its hearing on Tuesday, said: “The first people we should listen to are the military officers who have decades of experience with these issues. Their insights can help build a system that protects our citizens without sacrificing America’s ideals.”

Underlying the debate over how and whether to change the law on military commissions is a battle over the president’s authority to unilaterally prescribe procedures in a time of war. The Supreme Court’s decision was a rebuke to the administration’s assertions that President Bush’s powers should remain mostly unrestricted in a time of war.

Most military lawyers say they believe that few, if any, of the Guantánamo detainees could be convicted in a regular court-martial.

Lt. Col. Sharon A. Shaffer of the Air Force, the lawyer for a Sudanese detainee who has been charged before a military commission, said she was confident that she would win an acquittal for her client, who is suspected of being an accountant for Al Qaeda, under court-martial rules.

“For me it was awesome to see the court’s views on key issues I’ve been arguing for years,” Colonel Shaffer said.

The majority opinion, written by Justice John Paul Stevens, said the two biggest problems with the commissions were that the military authorities could bar defendants from being present at their own trial, citing security concerns, and that the procedures contained looser rules of evidence, even allowing hearsay and evidence obtained by torture, if the judge thought it helpful.

Colonel Shaffer said she was restrained under the rules from calling as a witness a Qaeda informant whose information had been used to charge her client. “I’m going to want for my client to face his accuser,” she said, “and for me to have an opportunity to impeach his testimony.”

    Military Lawyers Prepare to Speak on Guantánamo, NYT, 11.7.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/11/washington/11jags.html

Pentagon Struggles With Cost Overruns and Delays

July 11, 2006
The New York Times
By LESLIE WAYNE

On Sept. 10, 2001, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld stood before hundreds of military officers and civilian employees at the Pentagon and delivered a blistering attack on what he saw as the next national security threat: Pentagon bureaucracy.

He called for quicker decision-making, greater accountability and a streamlined process to get weapons into the hands of soldiers faster. “We must transform the way the department works and what it works on,” he said. “It could be said that it’s a matter of life and death — ultimately, every American’s.”

The terrorist attacks the next day did more than put Mr. Rumsfeld’s transformation plans in suspension. As new weapons systems were ordered to help fight the war on terror, Pentagon spending after 9/11 jumped by hundreds of billions of dollars. And so did waste.

Now, almost five years later, Congress has promised to clamp down on the inefficiencies and wasteful practices that Mr. Rumsfeld identified, which critics and government oversight agencies say have only grown worse with the flood of new money into military spending.

Members of Congress from both parties are concerned that runaway costs threaten to weaken the armed forces as higher price tags mean they can afford fewer weapons.

In the current Pentagon budget for 2007, steps have been taken to, among other things, require fuller disclosure of cost overruns, set spending caps and use more fixed-price contracts that require contractors to stay within budget. Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona and chairman of a Senate Armed Services subcommittee, plans to hold hearings this summer and next year on the issue.

Cost overruns have long been a Pentagon staple. But what has alarmed government oversight agencies and Pentagon observers, and spurred Congress to act, is the magnitude of the spending increases. Projects are as much as 50 percent over budget and up to four years late in delivery.

“We have been living in a rich man’s world for the last five years,” said Jacques Gansler, Pentagon under secretary for acquisition from 1997 to 2001 and vice president for research at the University of Maryland. “The defense budget has been growing so rapidly that we are less likely to put in many cost-sensitive reforms.”

In recent Congressional hearings and reports from the Government Accountability Office, Congress’s investigative arm, the Pentagon has been portrayed as so mired in bureaucracy and so enamored of the latest high-tech gadgetry that multi-billion-dollar weapon systems are running years behind in development and are dangerously over budget.

The Pentagon reported last April, in response to questions from lawmakers, that 36 of its major next-generation weapon systems are over budget, some by as much as 50 percent.

The G.A.O. estimated that cost overruns on 23 weapon systems it studied in April came to $23 billion. In addition, there were delays of at least a year in delivering these weapons, with some programs running as much as four years late, like the Army’s $130 billion Future Combat Systems to provide soldiers new computerized ground equipment.

David Walker, comptroller general of the United States, said in testimony before the House Armed Services Committee last April that “the Department of Defense is simply not positioned to deliver high-quality products in a timely and cost-efficient fashion.”

Rising costs can also mean that fewer weapons are ultimately built. For instance, the budget for a military rocket launching program, the Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle, has increased from $15.4 billion to $28 billion. Even so, the program is anticipating fewer launchings: 138 instead of the 181 initially planned.

Costs for an information-gathering satellite program, called the Space-Based Infrared System, have grown from $4.1 billion to $10.2 billion. Meanwhile, the number of satellites has decreased from five to three.

“It’s a perfect storm,” said Lawrence J. Korb, a former Pentagon assistant secretary, who served in the Reagan administration and is now a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. “You had this big buildup in military spending. That took a bubbling problem and made it worse. It made it more difficult to audit and keep track of what was going on. It’s always been bad, but I’ve never seen it this bad.”

Blame for the cost overruns is not easily assigned. Even though Mr. Rumsfeld identified the Pentagon itself as a problem in early 2001, the rapid buildup and cost overruns in recent years resulted from widespread calls for more military might.

While Mr. Rumsfeld has been successful in getting a few outmoded weapons systems deleted — his main triumphs have been killing the $11 billion Crusader artillery program and the $38 billion Comanche helicopter program —any momentum he developed for Pentagon transformation was overtaken by his focus on Iraq.

“Clearly, since 9/11, transformation has not been a focus of Rumsfeld,” Mr. Korb said.

War Expenses Add to Pressure

These cost overruns come as the Pentagon is under pressure on two fronts. It is trying to get weapons to soldiers in Iraq while embarking on a complex new procurement program costing hundreds of billions of dollars.

The Pentagon wants to fundamentally transform the military with more lethal and technologically superior “megasystems.” The Navy is spending $80 billion for advanced submarines and $70 billion for destroyers. The Air Force is in the midst of a $320 billion program to recapitalize its fighter jet fleet and the Army has ordered $130 billion in computerized replacements for tanks and other vehicles.

With numbers this large, even slight delays and overruns can quickly become billion-dollar problems.

Meantime, the Bush administration has warned the Pentagon that the current high level of military spending cannot be sustained, raising new questions of whether the Pentagon can afford everything it has committed to — or in the numbers it wants.

Some in Congress say the prospect of paying more for fewer weapons is, in itself, a kind of threat to national security. “Acquisition inefficiencies may, in the end, drive American vulnerabilities more than any other dimension of America’s national security complex,” said Representative Duncan Hunter, the California Republican who is chairman of the House Armed Services Committee.

The Pentagon says it is fully aware of these problems and is moving to correct them.

“We’ve got a lot of traction in the building, and I’m coming to help harness that traction and take it to the end zone,” said James I. Finley, under secretary for acquisition.

Mr. Finley, a former General Dynamics executive, is working to speed Pentagon decision-making, make the high-tech requirements for new weapons more realistic, and reduce the numerous design changes ordered by the Pentagon.

The impact on the Pentagon’s budget from the overruns is hard to gauge. That is because simply determining how much money the Pentagon has is difficult, the G.A.O. said last year.

The recordkeeping is so flawed and lacking in basic financial controls that government auditors are unable to provide a “clean” or conclusive opinion under basic accounting rules.

The G.A.O. found that financial sloppiness went beyond weapon systems. For instance, at a time when the Pentagon was buying new chemical suits for use in Iraq for $200 each, it was also selling them on the Internet for $3 each after some military units misidentified the suits as surplus. And about $1.2 billion in supplies that were shipped to Iraq never arrived — or were never found — because of logistical problems.

But the really big money is in weapons. New weapons are expected to cost at least $1.4 trillion from now to 2009, with $800 billion of those expenditures yet to be made, according to the Pentagon. Weapons systems are one of the largest purchases made by the federal government, and the Pentagon’s weapons-buying program has doubled from $700 billion before 9/11.

Since 9/11, the Pentagon budget and supplemental spending on Iraq have grown to over $500 billion a year. This compares with a Pentagon budget of $291 billion before 9/11. (If measured in today’s dollars, pre-9/11 spending would come to $330 billion, according to the Pentagon.)

A number of Pentagon improvement efforts — Mr. Rumsfeld’s best known is called the Business Management Modernization Program — have been tried in the last five years, to little effect. This shortcoming has not gone unnoticed in business circles.

A group called Business Leaders for Sensible Priorities, which includes 600 executives from companies like Bell Industries, the Pacific Stock Exchange and the Stride Rite Corporation, issued a report on Pentagon financial practices last May called “No One Is Accountable.”

It concluded: “The Defense Department’s financial management practices would put any civilian company out of business.”

A Move Toward More Control

In the last few months, Congress has moved to assert more control. In the House, Mr. Hunter put provisions in the Pentagon budget requiring more reporting on overruns, allowing for the rebidding of contracts with exceptional overruns and imposing spending caps on some weapons.

In the Senate, the Armed Services Committee has enacted provisions calling for more fixed-price weapons contracts, limiting award fees to contractors and providing for more Congressional oversight of prime contractors on major programs.

The Pentagon’s finances are under increasing scrutiny because the Bush administration has indicated that Pentagon budgets will begin to flatten in 2008. In addition, annual supplemental funding of $100 billion for Iraq and Afghanistan is expected to go away, with the funds to come instead from the Pentagon budget.

A federal budget deficit remaining around $300 billion and the rising demands to support entitlement programs as society ages also mean the Pentagon will have to compete harder for dollars. Inside the Pentagon, the growing gap between available resources and future demands is called the bow wave: a surge of costs that threatens to swamp the Pentagon just as military budgets begin to decline.

Military contractors are aware of these problems, but have little incentive to address them. Critics say contractors fail to object to the Pentagon’s business practices since the industry is paid regardless of the outcome. The industry says its hands are tied.

“This industry is rather unique,” said Norman R. Augustine, a former chief executive of Lockheed Martin Corporation and a former Army under secretary. “It has only one customer, but it is the most powerful customer in the world. It makes and enforces the rules, and if you want to do business with that customer, you do what that customer wants.

“Where the big money is lost,” he added, “is in starting programs and stopping, cutting the budget and then raising it, slowing and then accelerating programs, setting requirements and then revising them.”

Instead, Mr. Augustine said, “what is needed most is to make it extremely difficult to start a new program” and not until “the need is clear, the technology is there and there is money to do the job.”

Critics say the solution is not more money, but a different approach. The Pentagon, they say, is unable to separate wants from needs and approves far more than it can afford.

The Pentagon then sets technical requirements unrealistically high and compounds this problem by trying to rush weapon systems with unproven technologies into production. Rather than producing weapons faster, the opposite effect occurs, as the inevitable technological difficulties lead to cost overruns and developmental delays. In addition, once weapons programs are started, the Pentagon often imposes new requirements, adding further delays and costs.

Frequent turnover in program managers at the Pentagon, as well as a lack of either responsibility or accountability by officials for specific weapons programs, means there are few consequences when programs go astray, the G.A.O. said. It added that lack of accountability can extend to contractors as well.

In the civilian world, development costs are borne by companies themselves. Boeing, for instance, must absorb all the costs of developing a new line of commercial jets before selling them. But pay starts for military contractors even during development of new weapons, and the contractors do not face market forces to get weapons quickly to their customer, the Pentagon.

Nor are contractors held accountable when they underperform. A G.A.O. study in December found that the Pentagon had paid $8 billion in bonus award fees to military contractors regardless of whether performance goals were met.

For instance, contractors on the Joint Strike Fighter, a next-generation fighter jet, received their full bonus award of $494 million from 1999 to 2003, even though the program was $10 billion over budget and 11 months behind schedule.

Contractors in the F-22A fighter jet program, over the same time period, received 91 percent of their performance bonus, or $849 million, even though the current phase of the program was $10 billion over budget and two years late.

Mr. Walker, the comptroller general, said in testimony before the House Armed Services Committee that the Pentagon needed to make it “clear who is responsible for what and holding people accountable when these responsibilities are not fulfilled.”

The biggest program in the Pentagon pipeline is the Air Force’s replacement of its tactical aircraft fleet, primarily F-16’s, with F-22A’s and the Joint Strike Fighter. The combined price tag for the replacement plan is $320 billion, with $75 billion of that already appropriated. But problems are already cropping up from what critics say is a “conspiracy of hope” rather than hard-edged planning.

One consequence of rising costs is that about 4,500 F-16’s and other jets will be replaced by only 3,100 new jets. And as the Air Force waits for its new jets, it has stopped buying F-16’s. This means the newest models are flown by the United Arab Emirates and Poland, which have recently placed large orders.

When it was planned 19 years ago, the F-22A was an ambitious project by any measure. It was to fly invisibly, at supersonic speeds and with the latest in avionics and engines. All this was to counter Soviet threats in air-to-air combat. Initially, the Air Force had planned to spend $82 billion and buy 648 planes.

Since then, the Soviet threat ended and the F-22A encountered numerous cost overruns and schedule delays. The Air Force also added new requirements so the jet could also conduct bombing missions — even though some critics question the feasibility of using an expensive fighter jet that flies at nearly twice the speed of sound to attack ground targets.

In the end, the F-22A is costing nearly twice as much per plane as planned, and the Air Force is getting only one-quarter the number it had initially sought. The cost for each plane has soared to $361 million, making it the most expensive fighter jet ever. It is still not ready for combat.

Fewer Planes for More Money

The Air Force maintains it needs at least 381 F-22A’s to satisfy national security requirements. But the Pentagon has only enough money to buy 181, leaving a shortfall of about 200 aircraft. By contrast, the F-16 fighter jet began as a less ambitious program and was built in four years, using proven technology. It has been flying, with continual upgrades, for 30 years and is considered the most successful fighter jet in history.

Many in Congress are concerned that the replacement for the F-16, the Joint Strike Fighter being developed under a $257 billion program, may not be as cost-effective. Development costs have already risen by $23 billion, or 28 percent. This has caused the Pentagon to cut 400 planes from the program, which is now set for 2,443 planes.

Equally troublesome to critics is that the Pentagon has invested in manufacturing and producing the plane before it has been fully tested. The G.A.O. reports that when initial production of the Joint Strike Fighter begins next January, only 1 percent of its preflight testing will be completed. Longtime Pentagon watchers say that optimism about weapons and budgets is part of its inherent character. But the reality of limited funds and a growing chorus of critics may ultimately force the gap to close between what the Pentagon wants and what it can afford.

“We’ve always wanted to provide the best for our boys and we have been willing to pay for it,” said Mr. Gansler, the former acquisitions under secretary. “The belief has been that next year we will be richer and the budget will climb even more. But now, as the Pentagon has to be more-cost sensitive, you have to question the belief.”

    Pentagon Struggles With Cost Overruns and Delays, NYT, 11.7.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/11/business/11overruns.html?hp&ex=1152676800&en=6be07cf1a4dbf7f1&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Ex-G.I. in Rape-Killing Case Left Army Under Mental Illness Rule

July 6, 2006
The New York Times
By DAVID S. CLOUD

WASHINGTON, July 5 — A former Army private facing charges in connection with the rape and killing of an Iraqi woman in March and the death of her family as well was allowed to leave the Army in May under guidelines that required a medical finding that he was suffering from a severe personality disorder, according to documents released by the Army on Wednesday.

The former soldier, Pfc. Steven D. Green, left the Army on May 13 under a regulation that allows the Army to honorably discharge a soldier if a psychiatric evaluation finds a personality disorder "so severe that the soldier's ability to function effectively in the military environment is significantly impaired," the Army documents said.

It had previously been known only that Mr. Green was honorably discharged because of a personality disorder.

In April, Mr. Green had been sent from Iraq back to Fort Campbell, Ky., where his unit, the 101st Airborne Division, has its headquarters, the documents said. Army officials said they could not comment further on the circumstances of his removal, citing privacy restrictions. But they said it was not connected to the March 12 rape and killings near Mahmudiya, and noted that Mr. Green's alleged role in the incident did not come to light until last month.

Cecilia Osequera, a lawyer for Mr. Green, declined to comment.

Army officials also confirmed that Mr. Green had served in the same company as three soldiers who were ambushed in June at a checkpoint in Yusufiya. Two soldiers who survived that ambush were taken prisoner by insurgents and later killed and mutilated. Army investigators have been looking into whether the attack was in retaliation for the rape and killing of the Iraqi family.

But an Army spokesman, Paul Boyce, said Wednesday that no evidence had been uncovered so far that the two incidents were related. Mr. Boyce said that involvement of soldiers from the same unit appeared to be only an "intriguing coincidence."

Before Mr. Green was arrested on Friday, federal authorities said he might have been planning to attend a funeral service Saturday at Arlington National Cemetery for Specialist David J. Babineau, one of the ambushed soldiers. Mr. Green was arrested in North Carolina and faces charges in federal court.

Army regulations prohibit commanders from discharging soldiers found to have personality disorders if the action is intended "to spare a soldier who may have committed serious acts of misconduct" from prosecution by military authorities.

The regulations also require Army commanders to "counsel" any soldier with a personality disorder about deficiencies in his conduct and to give the soldier "ample opportunity to overcome those deficiencies."

A criminal complaint made public by the prosecutors on Monday charged that Mr. Green shot the three family members, including a child, with an AK-47 assault rifle. Citing interviews with unnamed participants, the document says that Mr. Green and other soldiers raped the woman, and that he then shot her several times, killing her.

The case is one of five recent incidents in which American military personnel have come under investigation in killings of unarmed Iraqis. Mr. Green was the first to be charged in civilian courts, a step that prosecutors said was necessitated by his discharge.

Mr. Green, whose permanent residence is listed by the Army as Denver City, Tex., entered the Army in February 2005, the documents said.

Last December, the Army posted a photograph of Private Green on its official Web site, which often carries pictures of soldiers in action in Iraq. The picture showed him aiming his rifle at the door of an Iraqi home. The caption said he was preparing "to blast a lock off the gate of an abandoned home during a search of homes" in the town of Mullah Fayed.

    Ex-G.I. in Rape-Killing Case Left Army Under Mental Illness Rule, NYT, 6.7.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/06/us/06private.html

Subpoena Issued in Retaliation Case

July 6, 2006
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

WASHINGTON, July 5 (AP) — Lawmakers have issued a subpoena seeking information from the Pentagon about a soldier who says he faced retaliation for reporting abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

The subpoena, from the House Committee on Government Reform, seeks all communications relating to information provided by the soldier, Specialist Samuel Provance of the Army, about the Iraq prison, where mistreatment of detainees by American troops caused an international uproar.

Representative Christopher Shays, Republican of Connecticut, said the subpoena, issued Friday, was necessary because lawmakers got no response to a March 7 letter to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld requesting the information.

A Defense Department spokesman, Lt. Col. Mark Ballesteros, said Wednesday that the Pentagon had already provided much of the information to the House Armed Services Committee.

    Subpoena Issued in Retaliation Case, NYT, 6.7.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/06/washington/06subpoena.html

 Military Fails Some Widows Over Benefits        NYT        27.6.2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/27/us/27benefits.html?hp&ex=
1151467200&en=6e3a4c39045cb093&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Military Fails Some Widows Over Benefits

June 27, 2006
The New York Times
By LIZETTE ALVAREZ

As Holly Wren coped with her 6-month-old son and the sorrow of losing her husband in Iraq last November, she assumed that the military's sense of structure and order would apply in death as it had in life.

Instead she encountered numerous hurdles in trying to collect survivor benefits. She received only half the amount owed her for housing because her husband, one of the highest ranking soldiers to die in Iraq, was listed as single, childless and living in Florida — wrong on every count. Lt. Col. Thomas Wren was married, with five children, and living in Northern Virginia.

She waited months for her husband's retirement money and more than two weeks for his death benefit, meant to arrive within days. And then Mrs. Wren went to court to become her son's legal guardian because no one had told her husband that a minor cannot be a beneficiary. "You are a number, and your husband is a number" said Mrs. Wren, who ultimately asked her congressman for help. "They need to understand that we are more than that."

For military widows, many of them young, stay-at-home mothers, the shock of losing a husband is often followed by the confounding task of untangling a collection of benefits from assorted bureaucracies.

While the process runs smoothly for many widows, for others it is characterized by lost files, long delays, an avalanche of paperwork, misinformation and gaps in the patchwork of laws governing survivor benefits.

Sometimes it is simply the Pentagon's massive bureaucracy that poses the problem. In other cases, laws exclude widows whose husbands died too early in the war or were killed in training rather than in combat. The result is that scores of families — it is impossible to know how many — lose out on money and benefits that they expected to receive or believed they were owed, say widows, advocates and legislators.

"Why do we want to draw arbitrary and capricious lines that exclude widows?" asked Senator Mike DeWine, an Ohio Republican, who has sponsored legislation to close some of the legal loopholes that penalize widows. "It seems to me we ought to err on the side of compassion for families."

Mr. DeWine said Congress sometimes passes these loopholes without considering the ramifications. But money also plays a large factor, and Congress is sometimes compelled to keep down costs associated with the war. "That's what you hear behind the scenes," Senator DeWine said.

The Army is also trying to address the problem, for example, with new call centers intended to help survivors navigate the bewildering bureaucracy. "As we always have, we constantly re-evaluate how we conduct our business to see if we can improve," said Col. Mary Torgersen, director of the Army casualty affairs operations center.

But legislators and advocates working with widows say the problems are often systemic, involving payouts by the mammoth Department of Defense accounting office and the Department of Veterans Affairs.

A few widows simply fall through the cracks altogether. The consequences are hard felt: they run up credit card bills, move in with relatives to save money, pull their children from private schools, spend money on lawyers or dedicate countless frustrating hours to unraveling the mix-ups.

"We have had more of these cases than I wish to know," said Ann G. Knowles, president of the National Association of County Veterans Service Officers, which helps veterans and widows with their claims.

The Department of Defense offers widows a range of benefits, including retirement security money, health care, life insurance payouts and a $100,000 death gratuity. The Department of Veterans Affairs allocates a minimum $1,033 monthly stipend and temporary transition assistance, among other things. Widows also receive money from the Social Security Administration.

But a benefit is only as valuable as a widow's ability to claim it. Just days after her husband was killed in Iraq by a roadside bomb, Laura Youngblood, who was pregnant with their second child, got another piece of sobering news from the Navy: Her mother-in-law, who had been estranged from the family for several years, would be receiving half of her husband's $400,000 life insurance payment.

Nearly a year later, Mrs. Youngblood, 27, is still trying to persuade the Navy that the military's accounting department lost her husband's 2004 insurance form naming her and her son as co-beneficiaries, along with the rest of his pre-deployment paperwork. The only forms the Navy can find are from 2003, listing an old address for her husband, Travis, an incorrect rank and no dependents.

The military paperwork was in such disarray, Mrs. Youngblood said, that her husband went months without combat pay and family separation pay because the defense accounting service did not realize he was in Iraq, where he was detached to a Marine Corps unit.

When the Navy said there was nothing it could do, the Marine Inspector General's office stepped in to investigate, forwarding findings to the Navy Inspector General's office. "These were my husband's dying wishes: to take care of his children," said Mrs. Youngblood, who has hired a lawyer to help her. "You honor his wishes. That's his blood money."

Congress has won plaudits in the past two years for increasing the payment after a soldier's death from $12,420 to $100,000 and upping the life insurance payout from $250,000 to $400,000. It made available to some recent widows a retirement income benefit for free. Congress has also paved the way for more generous health and housing benefits. Adding to that, numerous states have recently introduced free college tuition and property tax savings.

"Since 9/11, the demands on survivors are greater and they are getting much more in benefits," said Brad Snyder, the president of Armed Forces Services Corporation, which helps survivors with benefits. "The expectations of what we had in Vietnam were much lower."

But to the widows, some of whom adapted their lives to conform to the military, following their husbands from place to place, the complications can sting. Jennifer McCollum, 32, who was raised on bases and whose husband, Capt. Dan McCollum, a Marine Corps pilot, died in 2002 when his plane crashed in Pakistan, has been busy lobbying Congress to reverse gaps in the law that penalize some widows financially simply because of when their husbands died.

"The president, whom I support, said in the State of the Union address that he would not forget the families of the fallen," she said. "Why have I had to go to D.C. five times this year?"

Gaps in the Laws

Hundreds of widows are denied thousands of dollars in benefits because of arbitrary cut-off dates in the law. The family of a soldier who was killed in October 2003 receives less money than the family of a soldier who was killed in October 2005. "It is shameful that the government and Congress do not deliver the survivor benefits equally to all our widows with the same compassion and precision the military presents the folded flag at the grave," said Edie Smith, a leader of the Gold Star Wives of America, a group of 10,000 military widows that lobbies Congress and the Pentagon.

Shauna Moore was tending to her newborn, Hannah, on Feb. 21, 2003, when she learned that her husband, Sgt. Benjamin Moore, 25, had been shot during a rifle training exercise at Fort Hood, Tex. Months later, after her grief began to subside, she noticed that she was not entitled to the same retirement benefits as more recent widows with children.

Congress allowed certain widows to sign over to their children their husband's retirement benefit, sidestepping a steep so-called military widow's tax. But the law applies only to the widows of service members who died after Nov. 23, 2003. Mrs. Moore is one of an estimated 430 spouses with children who are ineligible.

If that option were available to Mrs. Moore, she would collect an extra $10,000 a year until Hannah became an adult.

"It makes a difference, if you are a single mom," she said.

Last week, the Senate approved Senator DeWine's measure that would extend the benefit to widows whose husbands died as far back as Oct. 7, 2001, the start of the war in Afghanistan. The House did not approve a similar measure, which is tucked into the Senate Defense Authorization bill, so now the issue must be resolved in negotiations.

Hundreds of widows also fail to qualify for a monthly payment of $250 in transition assistance, from the Department of Veterans Affairs, paid to help children for two years after their father's death. It applies only to those spouses whose husbands died after Feb. 1, 2005. Those who lost husbands before February 2003 received nothing because their transition is presumably over, and those who were widowed from 2003 to 2005 received a smaller amount.

Congress has closed some glaring gaps in laws, including one that excluded many families from the $100,000 death benefit and the $400,000 insurance payout because the soldiers' deaths were not combat-related. The outcry forced Congress last year to include all active-duty deaths since Oct. 7, 2001, in those benefits.

The Long Wait

Even good intentions demand patience. A much-upgraded health care benefit to help the children of service members who died on active duty has yet to be implemented after 18 months because the new regulations have not been written.

Because Champus/Tricare, the federal insurer for military families, does not recognize the law, widows are still paying out more money for health care, which some can ill afford.

The January 2005 law will greatly improve health care for all children. But Nichole Haycock's severely disabled son, Colten, 13, may not be among them.

Her husband, Sgt. First Class Jeffrey Haycock, 38, died in April 2002 after a run; Army doctors had failed to tell him about a heart condition they had discovered two months before. But because her husband did not die in a combat-related situation, her son was denied admission to a program for the disabled.

As she teeters on the brink of exhaustion, her two other children get short shrift.

"It's been very difficult to care for a child that is this severe by myself," Mrs. Haycock said. "I would love to see my daughter and son in school events. But I can't do those things."

Tricare officials cannot say for sure whether her son will be covered by the 2005 law when the regulations are written. Francine Forestell, the chief of its customer communications division, said federal regulators plan to interpret it as broadly as possible, "but we can't promise anything," she said.

A Lost Life but No Insurance

Few cases are as heartbreaking as the widow who winds up with little or no life insurance money after her husband's death. In many instances, the husband simply neglected to change the beneficiary. Little, if anything, can be done to recoup the money in such a case after it has been paid out, and advocates emphasize that couples must do a better job of educating themselves about benefits at pre-deployment family meetings.

But in some cases, widows said that they had done their jobs, had double-checked the paperwork and something still went wrong.

Staff Sgt. Dexter Kimble, 30, a marine, was killed Jan. 26, 2005, when his chopper crashed in an Iraqi sandstorm. It was his third deployment. Before he left, he redid all his deployment paperwork, after consulting with his wife, Dawanna. She noticed that the life insurance form on file still had designated his mother as a co-beneficiary.

"I said, 'What is this? Because I just had baby number four,' " Mrs. Kimble said. "He had not added baby number four to the paperwork, either. He said, 'Don't worry. I'm switching that and making you the sole beneficiary.' "

After his funeral, Mrs. Kimble said her casualty assistance officer informed her that her husband's paperwork had not been filed on time. The system had processed the 2001 form, and her mother-in-law had received half the $400,000. Her casualty officer offered to call her mother-in-law and explain what had happened.

"I assumed it wouldn't be a question of if," Mrs. Kimble said about the money, "but when."

Mrs. Kimble, who lives in Southern California, did not get any money from her mother-in-law. She received $300,000 — the death benefit and half of the insurance money — but used a chunk to help pay her extended family's way to the burial and to pay off the car and other debts. Maj. Jason Johnston, a public affairs officer for the Marine Corps Air Station Miramar, said the corps processed what it had. "I'm not saying the system is infallible," he said. "Anything is possible.

"If the Marine tells the spouse one thing and does another," he added, "that is very unfortunate. But we have to go by what the marine puts in the system."

Mrs. Kimble has taken a dead-end job in San Diego and is worried about the future. To get to work, she gets up at 4 a.m. She pulled one child out of private school. She left her home and is living with her children in a friend's empty house. She is also paying for child care for four children.

Lawrence Kelly, a lawyer who is representing Mrs. Youngblood and Mrs. Kimble, said the problem is not unlike that confronted by thousands of soldiers who have recently faced mistakes in their pay made by the military's mammoth accounting office. "Same system, same bureaucracy, same results," he said.

Responding to concerns from widows, Congress last year passed a law stating that if there is a change in the beneficiary or in the amount of the insurance, a spouse must be notified. But the law left a major loophole: If a service member makes no change in his beneficiary after he marries — if his mother or father were originally named and he did not change it — his wife does not have to be notified.

"It has left me frustrated and very bitter," Mrs. Kimble said. "We have already sacrificed our husbands. Our children are fatherless. For them to struggle financially is another blow."

    Military Fails Some Widows Over Benefits, NYT, 27.6.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/27/us/27benefits.html?hp&ex=1151467200&en=6e3a4c39045cb093&ei=5094&partner=homepage