After heading off a government shutdown with a “clean” temporary spending bill on December 7th, lawmakers are scrambling to reach a consensus under a new Continuing Resolution that funds the government beyond December 22nd. If leaders cannot come to a final agreement on spending levels and other thorny policy issues for a government spending deal… Keep reading →

  UPDATED: Adds Changes To Air Force Space Command CAPITOL HILL: Principal DoD Space Advisor. Gone. Air Force’s new A-11 space staff. Kaput. Defense Space Council. Dead. And that’s really just the beginning of what the Senate and House Armed Services Committees hath wrought to national security space in the National Defense Authorization Act. The… Keep reading →

ARLINGTON: House leadership wants to pass all the outstanding spending bills by Sunday, defense appropriations chairwoman Kay Granger said this afternoon. “We’re going to do… all the rest of them this week,” Granger told a DefenseNews conference here. “I was with the Majority Leader [Rep. Kevin McCarthy] last night, who said, ‘if we don’t finish… Keep reading →

President Trump’s just-released 2018 budget proposal meets the goals set by Secretary Jim Mattis when he came into office, the Pentagon insists, even though the budget does not deliver the impressive defense growth the president promised. Instead, it will, the administration says, be enough to patch up a “depleted” military that needs to be brought back to health after… Keep reading →

The Trump administration’s long awaited “skinny budget”, officially named “America First: A Budget Blueprint to Make America Great Again”, has arrived. It confirms the $54 billion increase in defense, and proposes to add $30 billion to this year’s (fiscal 2017) budget. It provides a description of what the Trump administration hopes to achieve in defense… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: President Donald Trump is pledging “an historic increase in defense spending” of $54 billion to $603 billion for the fiscal 2018 budget, but neither Congressional Republicans nor defense budgets experts were very impressed at first glance. “Such a budget request would represent an increase of $18.5 billion above the level proposed by President Obama for fiscal… Keep reading →

Presumptive Defense Secretary James Mattis sent a clear signal to America’s allies — and to his presumptive boss, President-Elect Trump — that the NATO alliance is “enormously” important and that America “must also take no ally for granted.” If approved by the Senate, Mattis said, in written answers to questions from the Senate Armed Services Committee,… Keep reading →

No one has done a better job of predicting the final outcomes of deals on the defense budget since sequestration was made law than Mackenzie Eaglen of the American Enterprise Institute. So we asked her to predict what this election will mean to the 2018 defense budget. With the election tomorrow, we couldn’t think of a… Keep reading →